Hollywood mourns Errol Flynn: From the archive, 16 October 1959
Vancouver, October 15
Errol Flynn, the film actor, whose favourite saying was "the way of a transgressor is not as hard as they claim," died in Vancouver last night in the apartment of a doctor friend. He had dropped in for a drink, but suddenly complained of a pain in his back and died of a heart attack - his fourth. He was 50.
Obituary
Errol Flynn was born on June 20, 1909, in Hobart, Tasmania, where his father and mother were cruising on a marine biological study. His father, Professor Theodore Thompson Flynn, of Queen's College, Belfast, is an authority on ocean life and is at present engaged on research work at London University. In Beam Ends, the first of three books he wrote, Errol Flynn recounted that in his early days, before he started acting, he was a policeman, coconut plantation overseer, seaman, and gold miner.
He began his acting career on the English stage with a Northampton repertory company and moved to Hollywood in 1935. He quickly became popular with the cinema-going public in adventure spectacles like Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, and Robin Hood. In 1945 he starred in Objective, Burma!, which was withdrawn from British cinemas after protests that it depicted Flynn winning the war in Burma single-handed. It was only recently that he escaped from swashbuckling parts and played a drunken adventurer in the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
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His immense popularity as a screen actor had more to do with his handsome appearance and buccaneer swagger than any innate acting ability. He will probably be remembered more for his spectacular private life in which he remained the personality he projected on the screen (a mixture of Bulldog Drummond and Don Juan).
During the revolution in Cuba at the beginning of this year he joined Dr Castro's rebel band and was wounded during a skirmish with government troops. He was married three times and divorced twice. At the time of his death he was separated from his third wife, Patrice Wymore, the film actress. He was concerned in many legal actions, several concerning alimony payments. In 1945 two paternity suits were filed against him in Los Angeles and dismissed seven years later. Flynn's last book has not yet been published because he is alleged to have refused his publisher's request to "tone down" some of the chapters. The title is: "My Wicked, Wicked Ways."