Rolf Sirnes (June 29, 1926 – January 14, 2004) was born in Haugesund,
Norway, the son of Anton Severin Aslaksen Sirnes and Otelie Marie Samsonsen. Rolf Sirnes eventually got a job as a steward on a yacht that sailed between New York and Florida.Partner Earle Hyman
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Vår Frelsers Gravlund
Haugesund, Haugesund kommune, Rogaland fylke, Norway
Rolf Sirnes (June 29, 1926 – January 14, 2004) was born in Haugesund,
Norway, the son of Anton Severin Aslaksen Sirnes and Otelie Marie Samsonsen. Rolf Sirnes eventually got a job as a steward on a yacht that sailed between New York and Florida.
Earle Hyman and Rolf met in 1954. We met at a party in Manhattan. We were young and poor and found out we were going to share an apartment, and we still do! Life with Earle has been wonderful, but also a roller coaster. Actors are a breed of their own and it's not far from top to bottom. Norway is my fatherland, but my heart belongs to New York. Rolf told that in an interview with the young journalism student Margaret Haavik in 2000.
Three years after they moved in together, Earle went to Norway for the first time, and in 1963 he had enormous success with his interpretation of "Othello" at Den Nationale Scene in Bergen. In sounding Norwegian, he and co-star Anne Gullestad, as "Desdemona", attracted fifty full houses and created Shakespeare fever in the city, according to Filmavisen.
"Othello" was to become a favorite role for Earle, and he would also later repeat it, with Lise Fjeldstad as the opposite. The two also caused controversy in the film "The African" from 1966. At the time, many people reacted to the love depicted between a black man and a white woman. At the same time, Fjeldstad got to know Rolf through his collaborations with Earle. First and foremost, I think of them as a beautiful story. They lived together their entire adult lives, as a harmonious couple, Fjeldstad told when she was interviewed by Haugesund's Avis in 2017.
After a 30-year intense love affair with our country, Hyman received the St. Olav's Medal from Consul General Bjarne Grindem in New York with the words: I send my most reverent and heartfelt thanks to King Olav. "This is the greatest moment of my life!" In April 1987, Earle received the prestigious award in his hometown. In the VG report, he further says that he is already traveling to Norway again in May. I've bought a cabin back home. Found me a wonderful place in Skånevik in Sunnhordland, and will spend two or three months there this summer. Skånevik was precisely the place where Rolf had also spent many summers as a child, so it was hardly chosen by chance. In the picture accompanying the article, he was in a warm embrace with a Norwegian, but it was the film actress Arlene Dahl who attended the big day, to honor her friend and colleague.
The two shared an apartment on the 33rd floor in Manhattan with the cat Tuss-Tuss that they had brought with them from Skånevik. Rolf worked the last 35 years of his professional life at "KO-Steakhouse" in Greenwich Village. The couple also featured in "Good evening Norway" on TV 2 in 2000. I could never live without Rolf. He is the best I could get, Earle stated.
Rolf died in the United States in 2004. He himself had wanted to be cremated in Norway at Vår Frelser's cemetery in Haugesund. Earle was quietly with his loved one to his final resting place. In front of those present, again in fluent Norwegian, he also had the strength to read Psalm 91 during the ceremony ahead of the urn lowering. Almost 50 years of cohabitation were over.
In his final years, Earle Hyman lived at the Lillian Booth Actors home in Englewood, New Jersey. He died there aged 91 on 17 November 2017. In the obituary in the New York Times, it was mostly about his career and that he broke racial barriers as an actor. It ends with a sentence that Earle never married, and died alone without any direct descendants. Rolf is not mentioned.
In June 2020, the Folger Shakespeare Library, a private research library in Washington D.C., acquired Earle Hyman's personal items and memorabilia to be displayed as the Earle Hyman Collection. In personal correspondences Hyman wrote that he and Rolf Sirnes, a Norwegian seaman, had lived together for fifty years. Hyman described their relationship as a passionate friendship and wrote that Sirnes was his partner.
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