After playing bad boy redeemed in Magnificent Obsession (1954), Hudson's popularity soared, consolidated by a number of successful melodramas, such as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Written on the Wind (1956), which were directed by Hudson's mentor, Douglas Sirk.

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Hudson was born Roy Harold Scherer, Jr. in Winnetka, Illinois on November 17, 1925. When his mother divorced his father, an auto mechanic, and married a man named Wallace Fitzgerald, the future actor became known as Roy Fitzgerald.

After high school and military service, he moved to Hollywood to pursue a movie career. Agent Henry Willson named him "Rock Hudson."

The Sirk films and an Oscar nomination for Giant (1956) notwithstanding, Hudson was not taken seriously as an actor until, ironically, he turned his hand to light comedy in Pillow Talk (1959), co-starring Doris Day. Other comedies with Day soon followed, including Lover Come Back (1962) and Send Me No Flowers (1964).

Throughout the 1960s, he alternated frothy sex comedies with action dramas. His one challenging role--that of a man who changes identities, in Seconds (1966)--caused little excitement and the film failed at the box office. A few years later, he was starring as a police commissioner in the long-running television series, McMillan and Wife (1971-1977).

The glossy hothouse melodrama that Hudson had helped popularize in the 1950s had, by the early 1980s, become a world television phenomenon. Hudson joined the cast of one of these super-rich sagas, Dynasty, in late 1984. His drawn features aroused comment, and by mid-1985 photographs of the spectral, virtually unrecognizable star were flashed across the world. Rumors that he was suffering from AIDS were confirmed when he sought treatment in Paris.

Hudson's death, a few months later, focused world attention on the AIDS virus and its sufferers, enabling Hudson's friend Elizabeth Taylor and others to gain the ear of government and moneyed people who had hitherto been deaf and mute on the subject.

Hudson's sex life received detailed attention posthumously when a lover, Marc Christian, whom he had not informed of his diagnosis, successfully sued his estate.

On screen, Rock Hudson was the epitome of the movie star: upright, virile, unassuming. His screen partnership with Doris Day further boosted his popularity as a wolfish playboy with a mischievous little boy charm. It could be claimed that Rock Hudson was one of the greatest actors who ever lived: a gay man who became an unassailable international symbol of heterosexuality.

Rock Hudson was probably the last of the manufactured stars, his screen presence bolstered by "beefcake" photographs, fan clubs, and an eternal bachelorhood briefly interrupted by an arranged marriage to Willson's secretary Phyllis Gates in 1955 (they were divorced in 1958).

However, in the more open 1970s, Hudson did become more visible in bars and bath-houses on the West Coast, and was even included post-coitally--anonymously but with his blessing--in Armistead Maupin's newspaper serial Tales of the City.

Hudson's charismatic mixture of seeming guilelessness and single-minded ambition, wearing a public mask until it was savagely ripped off him, places him firmly among the great American glamor icons: James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and President John F. Kennedy.

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Although he spent only two years in Hollywood before his untimely death, James Dean became an enduring icon of American film, one whose brooding non-conformity helped challenge rigid notions of masculinity.

Liberace was for many the epitome of flamboyant camp, yet he was also a gay man who steadfastly refused to acknowledge publicly his sexual identity.

A sharp social critic, novelist Armistead Maupin places his gay characters within a large framework of humanity, creating a social history of San Francisco during the tumultuous decades of the 1970s and 1980s.

A popular leading man of the 1950s and 1960s, actor George Nader did not publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation (and his long relationship with his partner Mark Miller) until after the death of Rock Hudson in 1986.