Rochelle Hudson

American film actress Rochelle Hudson (1916–1972) appeared in Hollywood films from the early 1930s through the 1960s. Her roles went from ingenue to leading lady to character actress. She is best remembered for co-starring in the tense and gripping social drama Wild Boys of the Road (William A. Wellman, 1933), playing Cosette in Les Misérables (Richard Boleslawski, 1935), as the older sister of Shirley Temple in Curly Top (Irving Cummings, 1935), and as Natalie Wood's mother in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955).


British postcard by De Reszke Cigarettes, no. 19.


British postcard by Art Photo, no. 95. Photo: Fox Films.


German collectors card by Ross Verlag in the Bunte Filmbilder series, II Folge, Bild no. 374, for Lloyd Zigaretten. Photo: Fox-Film.


British Handcoloured Real Photograph postcard in the Colourgraph Series, London, no. C 174.

"When a girl goes wrong, men go right after her!"

Rochelle Elizabeth Hudson was born in Oklahoma City in 1916. Her father, Ollie Lee Hudson, worked for the State Employment Bureau in Oklahoma and was a direct descendant of famed explorer Henry Hudson, who discovered the Hudson River and Hudson Bay.

Prodded by an ambitious stage mother, the 15-years-old Hudson became a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1931. RKO Pictures, which signed the teenager, added two years to her age because the public would never accept a 15-year-old in romantic leads.

In She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933), she played Sally Glynn, the fallen ingenue to whom Mae West imparts the immortal wisdom, "When a girl goes wrong, men go right after her!"

During her peak years in the 1930s, Hudson's roles included: Claudette Colbert's adult daughter in Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl, 1934), Richard Cromwell's love interest in the Will Rogers showcase Life Begins at Forty (George Marshall, 1935), and the daughter of carnival barker W.C. Fields in Poppy (A. Edward Sutherland, 1936).

Later she made mainly B-films and worked for television. Hudson co-starred in the CBS sitcom That's My Boy (1954-1955), based on the 1951 Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin film.


British postcard in the Film Weekly Series, London.


Italian postcard by Rizzoli & C., Milano, 1936. Photo: 20th Century Fox.


British postcard by Milton, no. 111. Photo: Fox Films.

This thing makes Ed Wood look like a big-budget A-list director!

Rochelle Hudson abandoned Hollywood for a time after playing Natalie Wood's mother in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) to run a 10,000-acre ranch in Arizona. She later moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and worked for a petroleum refinery.

Missing California, she returned in 1963 and, briefly, restarted her career, but left Hollywood for good in 1967. Her final film was Gallery of Horror (David L. Hewitt, 1967) with Lon Chaney Jr. John Bender at IMDb: "This film utterly amazed me in that it so completely had all the production values of a high school play! This thing makes Ed Wood look like a big-budget A-list director!"

Rochelle Hudson was married four times. Her first husband was Charles Brust. Little is known of the marriage other than it ended in divorce. She remarried in 1939 to Harold Thompson, who was the head of the Storyline Department at Disney Studios.

She assisted Thompson, who was doing espionage work in Mexico as a civilian during World War II. They posed as a vacationing couple to various parts of Mexico, to detect if there was any German activity in these areas. One of their more successful vacations uncovered a supply of high test aviation gas hidden by German agents in Baja, California. They divorced in 1947.

A year later, she married a third time to Los Angeles Times sportswriter, Dick Irving Hyland. The marriage lasted two years before the couple divorced. Her final marriage was to Robert Mindell, a hotel executive. The two remained together for eight years before they divorced in 1971.

In 1967, she had moved to Palm Desert where she found success in real estate. In 1972, Hudson was found dead in her home at the Palm Desert Country Club. A business associate discovered her body sprawled on the bathroom floor. Rochelle Hudson died of a heart attack brought on by a liver ailment. Her only close survivor was her mother.


British collectors card in the Glamour Girls of Stage and Films series by Arcadia Works, London, for Carreras Cigarettes, no. 24.


British Real Photograph postcard, London, no. FS 122. Photo: 20th Century Fox. Brian Donlevy and Rochelle Hudson in Born Reckless (Malcolm St. Clair, 1937).


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 689a. Photo: Fox.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 1014/1, 1937-1938. Photo: Hämmerer / Ufa.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.