Rochelle Hudson

Rochelle Elizabeth Hudson (March 6, 1916 – January 17, 1972) was an American film actress from the 1930s through the 1960s. Hudson was a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1931.

The Oklahoma City-born actress may be best remembered today for costarring in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), playing Cosette in Les Misérables (1935), playing Mary Blair, the older sister of Shirley Temple's character in Curly Top, and for playing Natalie Wood's mother in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

During her peak years in the 1930s, notable roles for Hudson included: Richard Cromwell's love interest in the Will Rogers showcase Life Begins at 40 (1935), the daughter of carnival barker W.C. Fields in Poppy (1936) and Claudette Colbert's adult daughter in Imitation of Life (1934).

She also played Sally Glynn, the fallen ingenue to whom Mae West imparts the immortal wisdom, "When a girl goes wrong, men go right after her!" in the 1933 Paramount film, She Done Him Wrong.

In the 1954–1955 television season, Hudson co-starred with Gil Stratton and Eddie Mayehoff in the CBS situation comedy That's My Boy, based on a 1951 Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin film of the same name.

Rochelle Hudson in Argentina magazine

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.

After their divorce in 1947, she married a third time the following year 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.

She was actually born in 1916, but the studio reportedly made her two years older for her to play a wider variety of roles, including romantic roles. In That's My Boy, she was cast as the mother of Gil Stratton, who was only six years her junior.

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