Errol Flynn & Patrice Wymore

The couple met in 1950 on the set of William Keighley’s “Rocky Mountain,” a Western filmed entirely on location in the spectacular New Mexico desert.Despite his reputation as a ladies’ man and being the only woman in the cast — excluding Marianne Stone’s fleeting scene as a corpse in a stagecoach accident — Wymore said the two were privately drawn together. She recalled bumping into Flynn for the first time on the set.

“I was in the makeup department and was called to the phone,” said Wymore. “I rushed to get it and ran into Errol. My hair was up in rollers, my face was covered in cold cream — I looked a mess! And I thought ‘Oh my God, I’ll be fired immediately.’' But she wasn’t, and their friendship grew.

“Errol and I shared a trailer — he had the front end, I had the back, and there was a kitchen in the middle,” she said. “We would meet over lunch, and so I got to know the man as well as the actor. It was a gradual thing. He was very intelligent and had a wonderful sense of humor.”

One evening, however, Flynn caught her off-guard. He asked her to his suite to rehearse a scene but they ended talking about everything under the sun.“It got to about midnight, and I told him I had to go and get some sleep as I had to be up at 4 o’clock,” she said. “I got to the door to leave, and he asked me to sit down again because he had something to say. He asked if I would marry him.”Her response surprised him a little.

“I said ‘you’ve got to be joking!’ but he was serious. So I suggested we should wait until we got back to Hollywood and to continue seeing each other for a while longer. I thought we might have had too much of the desert moon in our eyes.”

On October 1950 , A few weeks before “Rocky Mountain” was released, Wymore did indeed become the third Mrs. Errol Flynn when the couple married in Monte Carlo.The couple soon moved to their nearly 2,000-acre tropical paradise, with more than three miles of private beach overlooking the Caribbean Sea on the northeastern coast of Jamaica, which Flynn had fallen in love with while sailing in the region four years earlier. They had a daughter, Arnella Flynn, born in 1953.

They would later separate, but never divorce.Flynn was already in a physical and mental decline by the time they had married.When Flynn died in 1959, Wymore inherited the property where she remained the rest of her life.Although Flynn is remembered mostly for his flamboyant roles in movies such as “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “Captain Blood,” Wymore said her husband always wanted more serious roles.

“He really was not happy being labeled as the cinematic swashbuckling hero,” she said. “He longed to prove himself as an actor, and he was a very good one. But I think he always underestimated his own abilities. Some of his films are not first class, but he never fell out of character in any of the roles. He just had that magnetic quality that only the camera can pick up.”

Remembering Flynn, the man, from their short decade together was clearly a memory she treasured all her life.