Freda Jackson and Errol Flynn in Northampton

Freda Jackson, my new favourite actress, was the daughter of a Nottingham railwayman but learnt her craft in repertory theatre in Northampton.

Another young actor in the company at the time was Errol Flynn and it is is rumoured that he and Jackson had a fling.

As NottinghamshireLive once put it:

You can understand why notorious womaniser Errol Flynn might have been attracted to Nottingham-born actress Freda Jackson.

Flynn, the dashing actor with matinee idol looks, and Jackson, a dark-haired beauty, shared many a scene together as they learned their craft with the Northampton Repertory Theatre in the years before the Second World War.

But, quoted in the same article, Jackson (looking back across 50 years) was not complimentary about Flynn's acting:

"He was not an intellectual man but he was very shrewd. ... He knew that his supreme good looks were not enough to get him where he wanted to go, so he came to Northampton to learn his job.

"He did learn a lot from us, including how to walk across the stage without looking like something out of a zoo. When he left, he did so in a cloud of unpleasantness after hitting the stage manager, who was a woman,"

Jackson next saw him at a charitable event in the 1950s and recalled:

"I almost didn't recognise him. He had lost his good looks by then, and it was hardly surprising when you consider the life he had led."

Knowing the stories about them, the actor Michael Keating asked Freda Jackson about Flynn when they were filming an episode of Blake's 7. She would say no more than:

"Oh, he was a naughty boy. He was a very naughty boy."