Who Was Rock Hudson? - Hollywood Star Rock Hudson Facts

If you aren’t already falling for the big, beautiful eyes and sturdy jawline of Jake Picking as Rock Hudson in Netflix’s new alternate-history series, Hollywood, let us break it to you: You will be. Picking plays the real-life legendary actor, but with an important twist: He’s living in an alternate-history Tinseltown where race, gender, and sexual orientation didn't remain the barriers they were in reality.

Hollywood pulls important details from Hudson’s true story to build out its dream world, but his real life was every bit as fascinating—and, at times, far more heart-wrenching. To understand the decisions Hollywood makes, particularly around the more intimate details of Hudson’s tale, you’ll need to know a bit more about the man himself. Here’s who the real Rock Hudson was and became.

Rock Hudson wasn’t his real name.

Like Marilyn Monroe, Hudson adopted a flashier name when he began his acting career. He was born Roy Harold Scherer Jr. in 1925, though his legal name became Roy Fitzgerald when his stepfather, Wallace Fitzgerald, adopted him without his consent, according to The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives.

A former truck driver from Illinois, he briefly joined the U.S. Navy between 1944 and 1946, then moved to Los Angeles and donned the new title Rock Hudson in 1947, when his agent Henry Willson suggested it. The “Rock” comes from Rock of Gibraltar, and “Hudson” is representative of the Hudson River.

He had no acting training, but he made producers pay attention.

A pretty face will get you far in La La Land, then and now, and Hudson knew it. He was well aware of his chiseled good looks, despite his lack of acting training, so he would pose outside of studio gates to try and catch the attention of someone influential, or he’d send photographs of himself to producers.

For his biography of Hudson, All That Heaven Allows, writer Mark Griffin interviewed Ken Maley, a friend of Hudson’s. “Just think about the young Rock Hudson—this big stud standing up against his truck outside the studio gates,” Maley said. “He’d roll up his sleeves and just stand there, like some giant ad for sex, waiting to be noticed day after day.”

Eventually, at a local soiree, Hudson connected with Willson, and the influential agent signed him on.