Patrice Wymore obituary

The gifted singer, dancer and actor Patrice Wymore, who has died aged 87, had the misfortune to be typecast in secondary roles at Warner Bros studios in the 1950s, and to be known as the third wife of the Hollywood star Errol Flynn.

The 23-year-old Wymore and the 41-year-old Flynn got married after co-starring in Rocky Mountain (1950), a minor western in which he played an army officer who rescues her from marauding Indians, though they had no love scenes together on screen. It was Wymore's second film, while Flynn was a veteran of more than three dozen movies. It was the beginning of her film career, while his was on the slide. Both were under contract to Warner Bros.

At the time, MGM musicals reigned supreme, though Warner Bros had Doris Day, a top box-office singing star. She was the archetypal girl-next-door, with buttercup hair, a sunny smile and a honey voice. The auburn-haired Wymore had been cast by Warner Bros as Day's antithesis in her first film, Tea for Two (1950), one of the studio's trivial but tuneful backstage musicals. As Day's leggy, sharp-tongued rival for the lead in a Broadway musical, Wymore made an impact, especially while dancing a Latin American version of Crazy Rhythm.

Born in Miltonvale, Kansas, Wymore had been dancing and singing since the age of six, when she toured the US with her parents in vaudeville. By her early 20s, she was already appearing in musicals in New York, including two on Broadway, for one of which, Hold It! (1948), she won a Theatre World promising actress award. A Hollywood contract soon followed.

After her success in Tea for Two, Wymore was cast in a similar role in another Day musical, I'll See You in My Dreams (1951). In this fanciful biopic of the songwriter Gus Kahn (Danny Thomas), Wymore is a glamorous Ziegfeld star with whom the married Kahn almost dallies. Wymore (for some reason dubbed by Bonnie Lou Williams) sings two numbers, Carolina in the Morning and Love Me or Leave Me, the latter reprised over the phone to Kahn's faithful wife Day.

Wymore loses out to another woman again in The Big Trees (1952). This time, she plays a saucy saloon singer whom timber man Jim Fallon (Kirk Douglas) drops in favour of a pure Quaker girl. At one stage, venting her fury as a woman scorned, she calls Douglas "you stye on the eye of a flea on a thigh of a nit on the neck of a gnat!" She also performs (with her own voice) a stylish song and dance number, The Soubrette on the Police Gazette.

In She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), Wymore plays the aptly nicknamed "Poison" Ivy Williams. Out of jealousy over her boyfriend Don (played by the dancer Gene Nelson) falling for a student (Virginia Mayo), Wymore decides to reveal to the school's dean Mayo's hidden past as a burlesque queen called Hot Garters Gertie. Meanwhile, Wymore gets to dance a terrific number called Love Is Still for Free.

In She's Back on Broadway (1953), to quote the New York Times: "Patrice Wymore, who plays Virginia Mayo's competitor for the attentions of Steve Cochran, not only displays her temper but her legs and hoofing ability in several numbers." One of these, When I Dance With You, she performs brilliantly on top of a piano. As her Warners contract ended, Wymore managed to portray a "good girl" – a schoolteacher out west who falls for undercover agent Randolph Scott – in The Man Behind the Gun (1953).

Wymore, in semi-retirement, spent the following six years watching over Flynn, whose addiction to drugs and alcohol was taking its toll, and bringing up their daughter Arnella. During that period, Flynn and Wymore appeared together in the British-made King's Rhapsody (1955), a dated Ruritanian romance based on Ivor Novello's operetta. Flynn is a European prince who falls in love with a commoner, Anna Neagle, but is forced to marry Wymore, a handpicked princess. Flynn, looking the worse for wear, doesn't sing, but Wymore trills Some Day My Heart Will Awake and A Violin Began to Play.

Flynn died in 1959, aged 50. The following year, Wymore had a small role in Ocean's Eleven (1960) as the bitchy girlfriend of Frank Sinatra. With convincing venom, she tells him, "You really are a rat," when he threatens to leave her. In addition, she guest-starred in TV series and toured in summer stock productions of Broadway musicals such as Guys and Dolls and Irma La Douce, before retiring for good to the mansion on the 2,000-acre coconut plantation and cattle ranch in Port Antonio, Jamaica, that Flynn had left her.

Arnella died of an apparent drug overdose in 1998. Wymore is survived by her grandson, the actor and model Luke Flynn.