Douglas Sirk directed Rock Hudson in eight films– Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952), Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), Magnificent Obsession (1954), Captain Lightfoot (1955), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Never Say Goodbye (1956), Written on the Wind (1956), Battle Hymn(1957), and The Tarnished Angels (1958). Their’s was clearly a happy collaboration and, like Ford and Wayne, Hitchcock and Grant (and Stewart) and a handful of others I can’t think of, a perfect meshing of director and leading man. For the uncertain Hudson, Sirk appeared to be a supportive presence who made him feel at ease with his talents. For Sirk, Hudson’s stardom helped provide him with steady work–somewhat as Clint Eastwood did for Don Siegal in the late-sixties/early-seventies. Above is a nice little interview with Rock talking about Sirk and their work together. It’s from 1980 and was shot on the terrace of Rock’s apartment in The Beresford, on Central Park West and 81st street. Rock is having a cigarette and looks pretty much the same as he did twenty-five years earlier. Sirk retired from filmmaking in 1959 and lived another thirty years–a most unusual occurance as director’s tend to never retire and instead spend the last years of their life being frustrated in their efforts to make more movies. And here’s a strange Sirkian story that I found via the Criterion Collections essay on Sirk. I quoteth:

One would never guess that one of the major tragedies of his life involved his son. His only child, from his first wife, was born in 1925. She became a Nazi Party member in 1929. When Sirk married again, to Hilde Jary, a Jewish actress, his first wife refused to let him see their son again. Sirk and Jary left Germany in 1937. His son, Klaus Detlef Sierck, had been a child actor in Nazi films, including several by the most notorious of all Nazi directors, Veit Harlan, who made the infamous Jew Süss. Sirk’s son died at the age of eighteen, fighting with the German army on the eastern front in 1942. No parent, however estranged from his child, ever recovers from that. The only picture of Sirk’s that even touches on this subject is perhaps the most personal of his films, A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958).