There are several different versions of how the unknown and totally inexperienced Errol Flynn was chosen to play Fletcher Christian in In the Wake of the Bounty (1933). Writer and director Charles Chauvel supposedly saw a photo of Flynn after his yacht was wrecked off the Queensland coast and thought he had the necessary charisma.
According to John Hammond Moore in The Young Errol: Flynn Before Hollywood, a photo of Flynn and his mates on board Sirocco was published in a Sydney newspaper. However, that was more than two years earlier and it’s unlikely that Chauvel kept the photo “on the mere chance that he might make a movie and perhaps require the services of a completely unknown individual”.
Moore claims the budding film star was actually spotted on Sydney’s Bondi Beach by actor and casting agent, John Warwick, who arranged a meeting between Flynn and Chauvel in the Long Bar of the Hotel Australia.
Chauvel then chose Warwick to play Midshipman Young, and the three of them must surely have chatted about Flynn’s ancestry. Flynn’s scenes, including a re-enactment of the mutiny, were shot at the Cinesound studios in Sydney. Elsa Chauvel remembered the novice actor as a male butterfly who “breezed into our lives, caused trouble with the girls in the studio, and left”.
{ 0 comments… add one now }