The Errol Flynn Blog

Some of you fans may have seen this image before and it may be some where on this site but check it out.  Great to see this kind of thing from back then.

— twinarchers

I see Mr. Marino has his own link to this on Youtube but it has been there for some time from someone else too.  It has many still’s and film footage not seen anywhere else and it also is a second try for Christopher Lee to be in a higher budget film with good looking footage.  His first documentary on Flynn is available on DVD but the “feature film” footage is poor.  I advise you to get it anyway since it’s a good show and has rare interviews.  It’s a must have for Flynn fans.  Check this one out on YouTube as its not available yet in the states.

— twinarchers

The estate of Errol Flynn releases the news to the medfia of the death of Patricia Wymore Flynn in Portland, Jamaica, on Saturday, March 22:

Patrice Wymore Flynn, an actress during Hollywood’s Golden Age and the widow of screen legend Errol Flynn, died Saturday at her home in Portland, Jamaica. According to Robb Callahan a family spokesman she had been battling with pulmonary disease for the last year. She was 87.

The tall and elegant Mrs. Flynn began her career in musicals performing in Up in Central Park in 1947; She made her Broadway debut a year later in the musical Hold It! and won the Theatre World Award for “promising actress.” Following her performance in another musical, All for Love (1949), the Kansas born set-eyed beauty was handed a starlet contract by Warner Bros. and headed west to seek her fame and fortune. She found a little bit of both. She received notice for her first screen role, as the young upstart to Doris Day’s established Broadway star in the film musical Tea for Two. She continued to make films in the early 1950s, co-starring with such screen greats as Kirk Douglas, Ronald Reagan, Randolph Scott and Danny Thomas. But it was her second role, as the female lead in the 1950 western Rocky Mountain that would have the most lasting effect on Miss Wymore’s life; it was during principal photography for the film that she met her future husband, the aging screen legend Errol Flynn, the film’s male lead.

In his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn describes Wymore when they met as “attractive, warm, and wholesome…she could sing, she was reserved, she had beauty and dignity. [She] typified everything I long for…everything I am not.”

Though Flynn was engaged at the time, the co-stars soon became a couple and were married in late 1950 at Monaco Town Hall in Nice, France—an event about which Mr. Flynn later stated, “it was wonderful to have a legitimate wedding for a change.” (The marriage was his third and her first.)

Like Mr. Flynn himself, Hollywood films were then in the middle of a long transition from glamour to grit, but the first few years of the couple’s marriage were still illuminated by the fading lights of that passing era, when they would attend parties thrown by Marion Davies and film premieres in Beverly Hills. They had a daughter, Arnella Flynn, in 1953; within two years, Mrs. Flynn had stopped acting altogether to raise their child and care for Mr. Flynn, whose career had stalled and whose health was in serious decline. “Nobody ever tried harder than Pat to make me happy,” Flynn would later note in My Wicked, Wicked Ways.

After her husband’s death in 1959, Mrs. Flynn returned to acting, landing the role she is best known for today as Frank Sinatra’s girlfriend Adele Elkstrom in the original 1960 film version of Ocean’s Eleven. Music buffs probably also recognize her as the imperious magazine editor Madame Quagmeyer from 1960s television show The Monkees. In 1970 however, she retired from acting for good and moved to Flynn’s massive estate in Jamaica. Though the property’s coconut farm was eventually destroyed by disease, Mrs. Flynn was able to turn it into an active and successful cattle ranch, and it remains so today.

Mrs. Flynn never remarried. She is survived by her grandson Luke Flynn, an actor and model and the only child of Patrice and Errol’s deceased daughter Arnella.

– Special thanks to Robb Callahan, at the Errol Flynn Estate

— David DeWitt

Continuing the Flynn in Florida Tour:

Commencing in the late Thirties, Errol began to visit Miami. Here’s an account of what I believe was his first visit with Lili, in 1938, not too long after purchasing the “Sirocci” in Boston:

news.google.com…

Because of Westinghouse, this visit to Miami may prove, in a thousand years, to be Errol’s most well known appearance:

P.S. How about this wonderful shot of Lili and her “Glamor Boy” in the Bitly link below!:

bit.ly/1lZMUfN…

— Tim

I had the great fortune to drive through Sebring, Florida yesterday, during what I believe may be their renowned racetrack’s biggest weekend of the year. Recalling that Sean reportedly loved watching the races at Sebring, I decided to pay
a visit to see what I could see – or, rather, hear I could hear. Only about an hour from Sean’s home on Palm Beach, these races are quite sensational.

Perhaps Sean drove his ‘white 57 Chevy Convertible over once or twice,
channelling his Dad some on his way through the Everglades. Mid way through this video shoes Sebring how Sean would have seen it:

— Tim

I would like to begin a series of “drive by” looks at the Bundy Drive Boys”. Having just been in St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia), I thought I should begin with the legendary but today rarely known, Sadahichi Hartmann, “King of the Bohemians”, resting eternally and seemingly inconguously
in “The Sunshine City”.

Here’s the Royal Palm Cemetery, an Old South type cemetery, where he is buried:

And nearby Sadahich Hartmann’s final resting place is Co-Bohemian Jack Kerouac’s final home, pictured below the interesting cemetery plaque. I wonder if Jack knew how close he was to this Bohemian legend and Bundy Drive Boy !?!

Errol would have likely appreciated Kerouac’s comment that “[t]here was nowhere to go but everywhere …”

— Tim

Yesterday, I had the wonderful opportunity & great pleasure to attend the Florida Symphony’s fantastic performance of Erich Korngold’s exquisitely beautiful Violin Concerto in D Major.

Read the rest of this entry »

— Tim

Back in 1961 when Sean Leslie Flynn embarked on his cinematic career, he joked that after he did “The Son of Captain Blood” he would do the “son of Zorro”. Not quite, but the producer of “TSOCB”, Harry Joe Brown  did sign Sean up to do “Il Segno di Zorro” (translation: “The Sign of Zorro”). In this film (which had its initial European release in 1963) Sean got to display his athletic skills and prowess at fencing and horsemanship and he did a better acting job here than in his freshman outing. In my article, “The Forgotten Films of Sean Flynn” I stated (at least in my opinion) that Sean seemed to be channeling Errol and his performance was enjoyable to watch. As a matter of fact some of his dueling scenes could rival similar scenes in Errol’s “The Prince and the Pauper”.   The film was popular throughout Europe and was released in most countries as a Zorro film. But because of copyright issues (Disney had released a film titled, “The Sign of Zorro” in the US in 1960), any reference to Zorro was excised from the English language print. (There weren’t many, as the film only used the Zorro motif as a symbol (using “the sign of Zorro”)  and the character isn’t even called Zorro throughout its run.) Thus the film under the title, “Duel at the Rio Grande” was released in 1964 in Great Britain on a double bill with a remake of Maria Montez’s film “The Siren of Atlantis”. (This time under the title of “The Lost Kingdom”).  The film received little (if any) theatrical release in the US due to the copyright issue and was sold to television syndication in 1968 where it played in some markets as time filler in the afternoon and late nights before disappearing. When the video boom of the eighties took off, the film was released on home video in Finland, where it was released with Finnish subtitles. As edited, “Duel at the Rio Grande” is almost a completely different film from “Il Segno di Zorro”. “Duel at the Rio Grande” like most of Sean’s films is not available in the US on legitimate home video. (Il Segno di Zorro” has been released in German, French and Spanish.) You can catch it on YouTube as “The Sign of Zorro” and judge for yourself.–A. R.

[Sean’s costume in the movie remarkably resembles the cover illustration from the 1958 paperback edition of the “Mark of Zorro”. (see below)

— ILIKEFLYNN