Charles Higham, 1931–2012

last updated 8 January 2015

Charles Higham never let the truth get in the way of a good story. In his 1980 book Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, the celebrity biographer claimed to have found FBI papers proving that Flynn was a Nazi spy. Higham wrote that the matinee idol had shown footage of Pearl Harbor from the 1941 movie Dive Bomber to the Japanese before their attack. Widely denounced, Higham doggedly stuck by his claims. “I don’t have a document that says A, B, C, D, E, Errol Flynn was a Nazi agent,” he said. “But I have pieced together a mosaic that proves he is.”

The son of an advertising tycoon, Higham was born in London into a life “as dramatic as anything in his biographies,” said The New York Times. His parents divorced when he was very young, and he claimed his father’s new wife sexually abused him. He later lived with his mother, whom he called a “sexually insatiable alcoholic.” In the 1950s, he moved to Australia and married. The union ended when he announced his attraction to men “and his wife fell in love with a woman,” said the Los Angeles Times.

His work as a film journalist in Sydney soon brought Higham to Hollywood, said The Hollywood Reporter. His first biography, The Films of Orson Welles, was slammed by director Peter Bogdanovich as “an illustrated textbook on how to criminally impair an artist’s career.” Higham wrote two dozen more books, on everyone from Howard Hughes, whom he implicated in the Watergate scandal, to Cary Grant, whom he painted as a miserly, closeted homosexual. Higham shrugged off accusations of inaccuracy. “People who say they know their subject,” he once said, “are just being ridiculous.”