A recent, never completed film production about William Tell, which he had helped produce, had been a financial disaster, and his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, had yet to hit bookstore shelves. In fact, just one month earlier, his doctor had conducted an ECG and had cautioned Flynn to scale back his lifestyle.Ī swashbuckling star of the silver screen throughout the ’30s and ’40s, his career had been rocked by a series of scandals (including two different charges of statutory rape) and had yet to fully recover. In addition to cirrhosis, he was dealing with recurrent malaria, an intestinal infection, and chronic back pain (which, for a time, he had used heroin to combat), and had already suffered two previous heart attacks.

In the days before the incident, there were numerous indications that the actor was on his last legs notorious for his heavy drinking, hard living, and insatiable sexual appetite, Flynn already looked far older than his 50 years. It was his third, and he wouldn’t survive it.

It was October 14, 1959, and Hollywood star Errol Flynn was having a heart attack. From the outside, the apartment building at 1310 Burnaby Street is unremarkable-a quaint, two-storey walkup nestled amongst a half-dozen other such buildings, in a quiet section of the West End, just a few blocks from English Bay.īut 60 years ago this month, in the bedroom of Apartment 201, a macabre piece of Vancouver history was made.

My wicked wicked ways film