Olivia on Errol

 Olivia on Errol: “He was a charming and magnetic man, but so tormented.

I had a crush on Errol Flynn, and later I found he did for me. In fact, he proposed, but he was not divorced from Lili Damita so it was just as well that I said no.”

"Years later,” Olivia de Havilland continued, “I had an unhappy experience in Hollywood. A tall man kissed me on the back of the neck at a party and I whirled around in anger and said, ‘Do I know you?’ Then I realized it was Errol. He had changed so. His eyes were so sad. I had stared into them in enough movies to know his spirit was gone.”

While living in Paris twenty years after the filming of “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” de Havilland saw a rerun of the movie and wrote Flynn a long letter telling him it had brought back fond memories.

“It was an apology, twenty years later,” she recalled. “Seeing ‘Robin Hood’ after all those years made me realize how good all our adventure films were, and I wrote Errol that I was glad I had been in every scene of them.

But I tore up the letter. I reconsidered, deciding Errol would think I was silly. I’ll always be sorry I didn’t mail that letter. A few months later, he was dead.”

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Errol on Olivia: “During the making of Captain Blood I had grown very fond of Olivia. By the time we made The Charge of the Light Brigade I was sure I was in love with her.

So that acting in that hard-to-make picture became bearable. It took long to produce this vehicle, and all through it I feared I bothered her in very teasing ways though I was really trying to display my affection.

Olivia was only 21 then. I was married, of course, unhappily. Olivia was lovely and distant. She must have actively disliked me for the teasing I did, for I sprang some very obstreperous gags.

There was the time she found a dead snake in her panties as she went to put them on. She was terrified and she wept. She knew very well who was responsible and it couldn’t have endeared me to her.

It slowly penetrated my obtuse mind that juvenile pranks weren’t the way to a girl’s heart. But it was too late. I couldn’t soften her.”

Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn co-starred in 8 films together.

Best ones?