Eric's Obituary from the Daily Telegraph
ERIC FLYNN, who has died aged 62, was a fine male lead in many West End musicals, including Irene, Side by Side by Sondheim, Calamity Jane and Annie Get Your Gun; he was the original Bobby in Stephen Sondheim's Company and became known to a wider audience when he played Ivanhoe in the BBC's television adaptation of 1970.
Company - entirely set in the moment that Bobby, a bachelor who could not commit himself romantically, took to blow out the candles on his birthday cake - was one of the most innovative musicals of the 20th century.
Flynn was immediately at home in the part, forming afterwards a special affinity with Sondheim's work. He also shone in revivals of more traditional shows.
Over the years, Flynn numbered Julia McKenzie, the American pop singer Suzi Quatro and Barbara Windsor among his leading ladies. Eric William Flynn was born on December 13 1939 on Hainan Island in China, where his father was a Customs officer for the Hong Kong government.
After the outbreak of war, young Eric spent his earliest years interned with his family in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in China - an experience which he was to revisit 50 years later when he played a British prisoner in Stephen Spielberg's film Empire of The Sun.
Eric returned to Britain at the age of 13, and was educated at Chatham House School, Ramsgate, from which he gained a scholarship to Rada, where he met his first wife Fern. After Rada, Flynn was awarded a contract by Granada and presented and sang in shows which featured many of the early popular recording artists.
In 1961 Flynn began his stage career with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Amiens in their production of As You Like It, starring Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind. In 1962-3 he worked at the Old Vic with Tyrone Guthrie and Michael Elliott and played Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice.
He produced a fine performance in the RSC's production of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle (Aldwych, 1962) and the following year appeared alongside Charlie Drake at the Palladium in The Man in the Moon.
In 1964, he was engaged by an unlikely group of angels - the Moral Rearmament Association - to play a Christ-figure in Mr Brown Comes Down the Hill at the Westminster Theatre, which the MRA then owned. It was filmed the following year.
After The March Girl (Leatherhead, 1965), the next year Flynn returned to the West End as a caddish, lecherous drunk in The Professor at the Royal Court, and appeared in the comedy Sweet Fanny Adams at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, with Ronnie Barker.
By this time, Flynn had already appeared in a number of films, and was constantly in demand. He had taken roles in The Avengers and Dr Who and, in 1962, Dr Syn and The Silent Invasion.
He was also engaged, in 1966, by Anglia Television for a part in Weaver's Green, a short-lived rural competitor for Coronation Street, in which Flynn played the eager young partner of a country vet.
Despite this promising scenario - later to prove such a success for All Creatures Great and Small - the series did not prosper. That year, his "believable blend of baffled irritation and sympathy" in Richard Lortz's The Others (Leatherhead) was much admired.
In 1970, Flynn played Larry, the politically conscientious lead in Terry Hughes and Alan Fluck's musical version of Love On The Dole at Nottingham Playhouse, and burst on to television screens as Ivanhoe.
The series - broadcast during the BBC's prime slot for costume drama, tea time on a Sunday - was their first such programme to be shown in colour, and Flynn proved an "agile and resourceful hero", according to The Daily Telegraph. The Radio Times billed him as "a knight to remember".
Flynn's subsequently concentrated on musicals, in which his fine baritone voice was always in demand. As well as Company, he appeared in Irene (Adelphi, 1975) with Jon Pertwee, and his rendition of Anyone Can Whistle was one of the highlights of Ned Sherrin's 1978 production of Side by Side by Sondheim at the Garrick.
He played Wild Bill Hickock alongside Barbara Windsor in Calamity Jane at Croydon in 1979, and again put on a cowboy hat as Frank in Annie Get Your Gun (Aldwych, 1986), opposite Suzi Quatro.
In 1989, he was much admired as the Count in a revival of Sondheim's Little Night Music at Chichester, which transferred to the Piccadilly Theatre.
Flynn, usually known to friends as "Paddy", lived at Ide Hill, near Sevenoaks, for more than 20 years and was a stalwart of the village cricket team, batting and bowling with the same carefree spirit in which he played the swashbuckling Ivanhoe.
He also discovered the north coast of Pembrokeshire, where he had a holiday home and where the peace was disturbed only by Ide Hill's riotous bi-annual cricket tours.
Flynn met his second wife while touring in South Africa, where he lived and worked for five years in the early 1980s. They then settled in Pembrokeshire, where they restored a Georgian mansion, which Flynn intended to run as a guest house and pottery studio.
The peace there and his annual retreats in India enabled him to face his final illness with great fortitude. He married, first, in 1959, Fern Warner; they had two sons, the actors Daniel Flynn and Jerome Flynn - who, with Robson Green, scored a number one hit with Unchained Melody - and a daughter.
After the marriage was dissolved in 1980, he married, secondly, in 1981, Caroline Forbes, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Jerome Flynn (b. March 16, 1963) is a British actor best known for his role as Corporal Paddy Garvey of the King's Fusiliers in the ITV series Soldier Soldier.
Flynn was born in Bromley, Kent, the son of actor and singer, Eric Flynn.
Flynn had three UK number one hits with Robson Green (as Robson & Jerome) in 1995 and 1996 with Unchained Melody, I Believe and What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted.
He has recently been touring as Tommy Cooper in Jus' Like That, a tribute to the comic magician written by John Fisher and directed by Simon Callow.


He is very much involved with wildlife projects and supports many charities.

See his website www.jeromeflynn.com

Yep...Oscar Winning Sam Mendes played for the Vagabonds in 1990 (introduced to us by Eric Flynn) He is top left in the photo below, Eric two to his right



Mendes first attracted attention for his assured production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in the West End starring Judi Dench. He was under 25. Soon he was directing plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company where his productions, many of them featuring Simon Russell Beale, included Troilus and Cressida, Richard III and The Tempest. These productions were praised for their clarity, intelligence and stylishness.
He has also worked at the Royal National Theatre, directing Edward Bond's The Sea, Jim Cartwright's The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, and Othello with Simon Russell Beale as Iago.
In 1992 he was appointed artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, an intimate studio space in London's West End which he quickly transformed into one of the most exciting venues in the city. His opening production was Stephen Sondheim's Assassins which revelled in the show's dark, comic brilliance and rescued it from the critical opprobrium it had suffered on its American opening. He followed this with a series of excellent classic revivals, many of which attracted some of the finest actors and biggest stars of the decade. Among Mendes's best productions were John Kander and Fred Ebb's Cabaret, Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, Stephen Sondheim's Company, Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus and his farewell duo of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night, which transferred to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As artistic director Mendes also gave some of the country's finest younger directors the opportunity to do some of their best work: Matthew Warchus's production of Sam Shepard's True West, Katie Mitchell's of Beckett's Endgame, David Leveaux's of Sophocles's Elektra and Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing were amongst the most critically acclaimed of the decade. The Donmar's present artistic diretor Michael Grandage directed some of the key productions of the later part of Mendes's tenure, including Peter Nichols's Passion Play and Privates on Parade and Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along.

• Won a Critics Circle Award for Best Newcomer after directing Judi Dench in The Cherry Orchard.
• 1990: Began directing for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
• 1992: became artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse theatre
• 1994: directed revival of Oliver! (with score specially revised and added to by the original composer and lyricist, Lionel Bart) at the London Palladium; the show ran for four years, becoming, on July 8, 1997, the longest-running show at that venue.
• 1994: directed revival of Cabaret
• 1995: won Olivier award for Best Director for The Glass Menagerie
• 1996: won Oliver award for Best Director of a Musical for Company
• 1998: revival of Cabaret opens on Broadway; wins four Tony Awards, including Best Musical (Revival)
• 1998: directed David Hare's The Blue Room, starring Nicole Kidman (and Iain Glen).
• 2003: won Olivier award for Best Director for Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night
• 2003: directed a Broadway revival of Gypsy, starring Bernadette Peters.
• 2004: started his own production company, Scamp, and started it off with an import of the American play Fuddy Meers, which met with mixed reactions

...all obligingly posing with our own star Luke Jackson on the set of an advertisement for Sky cricket