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| Bill Flynn, 1948-2007 |
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Bill Flynn would, perhaps, have chuckled at the timing of it all. Just a few hours after he died of a heart attack on Wednesday, he was due to appear in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. No doubt he would also have been angry that he couldn’t perform in the play: based on the stage comedies of ancient Rome, it contains all the elements of farce that the actor exploited so adroitly during his long career. Yet Flynn was no neo-classicist; he remained, to the end, a regular South African ‘ou’. It was this identity that was the key to his success, allowing him to bridge the divides between sport and theatre, between the ‘high’ art of the stage and the ‘low’ art of popular music (although that term does a disservice to the bands in which he sang, “Vinnie and the Viscounts” and “The Rock Rebels”).As a university student in the 1960s, Flynn chose to pursue acting over a possible career as a rugby player – although his passion for the game would drive some of his most well-known acting pursuits. It was at UCT that Flynn met Paul Slabolepszy, and their friendship led to numerous stage and screen collaborations over the years. The first of these was Saturday Night at the Palace, a tragicomedy that ran to sold out houses for three years (a feat almost unheard of in South Africa, at that time or subsequently). The duo is perhaps best known for Heel against the Head and its sequel Running Riot, about the antics of hapless but patriotic sports fans Tjokkie and Crispin. A clearly distraught Slabolepszy said on Thursday, “It’s been 40 years of celebration: celebrating theatre, life, humanity, with laughter and tears. I don’t know how I’ll carry on the journey without him; in the past, although sometimes one of us was running ahead and one of us was lagging behind, mostly we walked side by side. It was an honour, a privilege and a blessing to be his friend. Bill’s gift to the people of South Africa was that he made them feel alive. I’ll say this: whoever missed Bill Flynn in performance was much the poorer for it. He was one of the greats – not just in this country, but throughout the world.” Indeed, Flynn had a global profile. Many of the stage productions he was involved in toured internationally (he was particularly proud of performing at London’s famous Old Vic theatre). He appeared on TV screens in Britain, America, Europe and Australiasia; he starred in over 40 movies, some of which were box office hits in the US while they remained relatively obscure in South Africa. Not everything that Flynn touched turned to gold. He was involved a few years ago in breakfast special The Toasty Show, which had a mixed reception, as did last year’s Fangs, a musical about a South African dracula. Onscreen, he experimented with diverse genres – western, horror, action – and, although it was as a comic actor that he was best known to South African film and TV audiences, his role in police drama Jozi Streets reminded viewers that he could perform ‘serious’ material too. This he certainly did, playing Pozzo in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Johnnie in Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye and, twenty-five years apart, the roles of Biff and Willie Loman in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Ultimately, he was a theatre man. The film version of Heel Against the Head has become the most hired video in South Africa, but Flynn insisted that “the movie never really captured the madness and fun that happened on stage”; he also became frustrated by the “‘assembly line’ manner of shooting” TV shows in an industry where “talk is the cheapest commodity of all”. Flynn was widely liked and respected. His death has shocked the South African entertainment community. |
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