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ERIC FLYNN
 
Not Errol, but Eric …

One of the most square-jawed of our stout-hearted men, Eric Flynn was nothing if not manly. He could stand well on stage, and move about, and had a fine voice. Perhaps it didn't matter that he never really established himself as a leading man in musicals - he was kept busy enough in films and on television, where he is probably best remembered for his portrayal of Sir Walter Scott's valiant hero Ivanhoe. Flynn was made to play heroes.



Fit for a clothing catalogue: Eric Flynn in some natty knitwear
He was the sort of guy who looked comfortable in chain-mail. And there was surely a sort of resemblance to another Mr Flynn - Errol - with whom our Eric (with his oh so close name) might get confused. He seemed to want to be that sort of hero, anyway: all-male, and jolly sexy with it. It wasn't really a type that British musicals knew how to handle.
 
Flynn was born in China and grew up in the Far East, spending four years in a Shanghai POW camp. He first became involved with music when he was a chorister at Victoria Cathedral, Hong Kong, and when he was ten he was touring army bases with a concert party during the Korean War. 'We had no women in the group, so I sang all the Jo Stafford numbers', he claimed. His education was completed in England, and then he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His beginnings as an actor were classical. He was at Stratford and at the Aldwych Theatre in 1960, appearing in As You Like It with Vanessa Redgrave, and played Bassanio at the Old Vic in 1962. The call of the lighter stage was obviously intense, for the next year he was in the supporting cast of a space-age pantomime written for Charlie Drake, The Man in The Moon, at the London Palladium. As the extra-terrestrial principal boy Argon (the first male principal boy the Palladium had ever had, or so he said), Flynn seemed a million miles away from the Old Vic (and the planet that had presumably given him birth), but at least he was launched on his helter-skelter career in musicals. It progressed by fits and starts.
 
In November 1965 he was cast as Joe, the leader of the striking dock-workers in the first production of The Matchgirls at Leatherhead opposite Vivienne Martin. When the show eventually transferred to the Globe Theatre, Martin went with it but Flynn had gone, to be replaced by Gerard Hely. He was no luckier when he was cast five years later as the hero Larry Meath in an interesting piece, Love On The Dole, seen at the Nottingham Playhouse. In fact, Larry got killed off before the final curtain, and the show stopped dead at Nottingham. In December 1971 Flynn played Barnett in Good Time Johnny for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, but, again, it was a show that was to have no after-life.
 
Then things picked up considerably. It may have been only a take-over, but he was cast as the male lead in the British cast that followed the original Broadway cast into Stephen Sondheim's Company at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1972. There was a good chance that he might be noticed at last, and he was. When Company closed, he won the lead opposite Lauren Bacall in Applause, when that musical opened at the same theatre at the end of the year. He acquitted himself well, but it was obvious that Bacall's starry performance pretty well cancelled out everyone else in sight. When Applause ended its run, Flynn seems to have vanished from the West End. In 1975 he was third-billed in the part of Bill Holland below Diana Coupland and Jon Pertwee in a Monty Norman musical, So Who Needs Marriage?, which endured a short, ill-attended tour after its premiere in Brighton in the summer of 1975. It closed in disarray in Norwich, seen by a handful of people in the stalls, at Norwich Theatre Royal a few weeks later. Somewhere among it all Flynn had done his big number, 'Before It's Too Late'.
 
A pity it didn't quite seem to work out for Flynn, because it was good to have him around.

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