Doris Day, 96, ‘speaks out on friendship with Rock Hudson in extremely rare interview’

Day, 96, has largely retired from the spotlight, and rarely speaks out in interviews. But according to the USA’s Closer magazine, she recently spoke to author Mark Griffin for his Hudson book, All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson. They had made three movies together, including Pillow Talk in 1959, and continued a friendship that went right up until his death from AIDS in 1985.

Talking briefly to Griffin, she sang the praises of the late legend.

“I honestly don’t think I taught him anything he didn’t already know after all his years in the business,” she said.

“Between scenes we’d walk and talk and laugh, and I guess our comedic timing grew out of our friendship and how naturally funny we were together.”

Griffin added: “They just played off one another beautifully.

“What’s interesting now, years after all these movies have been released, is if you say Rock Hudson, the next thing people inevitably say is Doris Day.

“They’re synonymous with each other.”

Day, born Doris Mary Kappelhoff in 1922, began her career as a big band singer in 1939, before soon becoming one of the most famous Americans of all time.

She was the biggest female film star of the early 1960s, and and in 2011 she returned to the UK Top 10 with an album of previously unheard material, called My Heart.

Hudson was one of the first major public figures to publicly acknowledge that he was fighting AIDS.

Griffin writes in the book that he struggled as a closeted gay man who felt completely unable to be open about his sexuality in the public eye.

“Long before he landed in Hollywood, he understood that if he wanted to be accepted, the very essence of who he was would have to be edited out of the frame,” the author wrote.

All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson is out on Thursday.