The Errol Flynn Blog

Dear Flynnmates,

whatta ham.

Enjoy,

— shangheinz

Dear Flynnmates,

“How is all this?”, wondered Errol Flynn  in a home story for an architectural magazine about his new built house at 7740 Mulholland Drive. “I am still in my thirties and I am sitting on top of the world”.

He refers to his new home as Mulholland House built in the style of Connecticut farmhouse and graciously offers a glimpse not only into his habitat but also his soul.

“I was a pirate in another life and believe dying is only dying on this earth..”

He elaborates how via way of Tahiti he was washed ashore at Warners and beat out Leslie Howard, Ronald Coleman, Frederic March and Clark Gable for the role of Captain Blood vacated by Robert Donat.

Marion Davies had been first choice to star opposite him, but William Randolph Hearst considered the part not prestigious enough for his protegé and consoled her with a ocean front beach house at Santa Monica instead.

Flynn meanwhile built his dream house on eleven and a half acres in the Hollywood hills with panoramic view of the ranch lands of the San Fernando Valley before it became sub urbanized.

“She went up fast, like the sails of a boat,” he remembered the costs escalating from $35.000 to $ 125000 after he made various additions like the circular stables copied from the Lipizzaner stables in  Vienna.

The den true to style mimicked a pirate`s lair with a zebra skin rug, a model galleon over the fireplace, a ship`s clock, a barometer and another ship`s model top the stairs with a brass tab on its glass case engraved with four lines of verse that pretty much summed up its owner`s philosophy:

“One ship sails east/the other west/by the same winds that blow/it`s the set of the sails and not the rules/that decide the way to go.”

Enjoy,

— shangheinz

Dear Flynnmates,

we wish you all a very merroly Christmas and a happy`n`healthy New Year.

Enjoy,

— shangheinz

Dear Flynnmates,

since Hitler did not only wage war on the world, but on Warner Bros. too, Errol`s movies were banned in most of Europe until 1945. Once released they instantly became huge successes. In 1951 Flynn was awarded the “Bambi”, a feline golden statuette, for favorite screen actor in Germany of that year. This may even have prompted him to come over to take over the Old Continent. Here are some marvelous hand painted European movie posters, which in their own right contributed to his outstanding cinematic reputation.

Enjoy.

— shangheinz