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Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn (June 20, 1909 – October 14, 1959) was an Australian-American film actor, most famous for his romantic swashbuckler roles and flamboyant lifestyle.

Youth

Born in Hobart, Australia, he was taken to Sydney, Australia as a child, where he attended Sydney Church of England Grammar School ("Shore") from which he was expelled for having sex with the daughter of the school laundress. He was also expelled from the next school he attended. Shortly afterwards, he moved to New Guinea, where he bought a tobacco plantation, a business which failed. In 1933, he starred in the Australian-made film In The Wake Of The Bounty directed by Charles Chauvel. In the early 1930s, he left for Britain and in 1933, got an acting job with Northampton Repertory Company, where he worked for six months. According to Gerry Connelly's Book Errol Flynn in Northampton, he also acted at the 1934 Malvern Festival, and also in Glasgow and in London's West End. He was discovered by a Warner Bros. executive, signed to a contract and shipped to America as a contract player.

Acting career

Flynn became an overnight sensation with his third film, Captain Blood, in 1935. He became typecast as a swashbuckler and made a host of such films, including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) (widely regarded as his best film in this genre and an acknowledged Hollywood classic), Dodge City (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), and The Adventures of Don Juan (1948).

Flynn played opposite Olivia de Havilland in eight films, including Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1938), The Adventures of Robin Hood, Santa Fe Trail (1940), and They Died with their Boots On (1941). The two were never romantically involved.

During the shooting of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Flynn and co-star Bette Davis had some legendary off-screen fights, with Davis striking him harder than necessary while filming a scene. Their relationship was always strained but Warner Bros. teamed them up on two separate occasions. A contract was even presented to loan them out as Rhett and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind; however, the teaming failed to materialize when Davis declined to work with Flynn.

Flynn was well known for drinking, womanizing, and throwing wild parties. However, his lifestyle caught up with him when teenagers Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee accused him of statutory rape in November 1942. A group organized to support Flynn, named the American Boys Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn (ABCDEF); its members included, surprisingly, William F. Buckley, Jr.. The trial took place in January and February of 1943, and Flynn was cleared of the crime. The incident served to increase his reputation as a lady's man, and the term "In Like Flynn" came to be synonymous with succeeding in romantic endeavors.

Flynn was a member of Hollywood's Cricket Club, along with his close friend David Niven. His suave, debonair, and devil-may-care attitude towards both ladies and life has been immortalized into the English language by author Benjamin S. Johnson as "Errolesque" in his treatise on the subject, "An Errolesque Philosophy on Life." *

By the 1950s, Flynn became a parody of himself. Heavy alcohol and drug abuse left him prematurely aged and bloated, but he still won acclaim as a drunken ne'er-do-well in The Sun Also Rises (1957). His colourful but somewhat creative autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, was published just months after his death and contains humorous anecdotes about Hollywood. In 1984, CBS produced a televison mini-series based on Flynn's autobiography, starring Duncan Regehr as the dashing, flamboyant ladies' man. Flynn wanted to call the book In Like Me, but the publisher refused.

Private life, family and death

Flynn was married three times, to actress Lili Damita from 1935 until 1942 (one son, Sean Flynn); to Nora Eddington from 1943 until 1948 (two daughters, Deirdre and Rory); and to actress Patrice Wymore from 1950 until his death (one daughter, Arnella Roma).

In the late 1950s, Flynn met the 15-year-old Beverly Aadland at the Hollywood Professional School, whom he courted during his last few years. He planned to marry her and move to their new house in Jamaica, but during their trip to Vancouver he died of a heart attack. His only son, Sean Flynn, became an actor and later a war correspondent who disappeared in Cambodia in 1970 during the Vietnam War. The younger Flynn's life was recounted in Inherited Risk by Jeffrey Meyers (Simon & Schuster).

One of Errol Flynn's grandsons, model Luke Flynn (born Luke Stoecker in 1976), the only child of Arnella Flynn (1953-1998) and fashion photographer Carl Stoecker, was named one of the world's sexiest bachelors by People magazine in 2003. His mother, a former fashion model, died on the Flynn family estate in Jamaica at the age of 45.

Flynn died of a massive heart attack at the home of a friend in Vancouver, British Columbia on October 14 1959, at the age of fifty. He was survived by both his parents. He is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California. He shares coffin space with six bottles of whiskey, a parting gift from his drinking buddies.

Flynn received American citizenship in 1942. In Hollywood he tended to refer himself as Irish rather than Australian, supposedly as he felt few people there knew of Australia. His father Theodore Thomson Flynn was a biologist and a professor at the Queen's University of Belfast.

Post-death controversy

Author Charles Higham published a controversial biography, Errol Flynn: The Untold Story (Doubleday, 1980) in which he alleged that Flynn was a fascist sympathiser and that he spied for the Nazis before and during World War II. In Disney's 1991 film The Rocketeer, the major villain, Neville Sinclair, was a 1930's Hollywood actor who spied for the Nazis in an obvious reference to Higham's allegations about Errol Flynn.

Subsequent biographies—notably Tony Thomas' Errol Flynn: The Spy Who Never Was (Citadel, 1990)—have denounced Higham's claims as fabrications. Flynn's political leanings appear to be of a leftist bent. He was a supporter of the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War and of the Cuban Revolution, even narrating a documentary titled 'Cuban Story' shortly before his death.

According to Flynn's own words in My Wicked, Wicked Ways, he considered Fidel Castro to be a personal friend. He went to Cuba to experience the Cuban revolution first-hand. He found Castro fascinating and declared in 1959, on the Canadian television program Front Page Challenge, that Castro would go down in history as one of the greats.

Pop culture references

  • In popular music, Flynn was the inspiration for the song "Errol" by the '80s rock group Australian Crawl. It was a Top 20 Australian hit in 1981. Sirocco, the LP from which the song was taken, was named after Flynn's yacht.
  • See also Rafael Sabatini, author of the novels The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood, for the roots of Flynn's screen image.
  • Amanda McBroom recorded a song titled, "Errol Flynn."
  • Turner Classic Movies' 2004 production of "The Adventures of Errol Flynn." is widely regarded as the best documentary on the life of Errol Flynn.
  • The phrase "In like Flynn" became common after the court case in which he was found innocent of statutory rape of two underaged girls. The origins of the phrase are disputed.
  • Nightcrawler, of the popular Marvel Comics title X-Men, is often said to be a fan of Errol Flynn, occasionally being written to reflect the swashbuckling, romantic personality of Flynn's roles. In fact, in alternate universe of Mutant X, his character and personality is based entirely on the image of Flynn's roles.
  • The character Alan Swann in the film and Broadway musical My Favorite Year is based on Flynn.
  • In the song "Blood on the Rooftops," on the Wind & Wuthering album by Genesis, he is mentioned: "The trouble was started by a young Errol Flynn."
  • In the song "If Music Could Talk," by The Clash (on the album Sandinista), he is mentioned: "My drummer friend comes shooting by He said Errol Flynn will never die." The Clash also wrote a song about Flynn's son, Sean Flynn that appears on Combat Rock.
  • In the PC game Crimson Skies the protagonist Nathan Zachary states that, "Errol Flynn impersonates me, not the other way around."
  • In an episode of Jem and the Holograms, "Colliding Stars", Jem has a close call when Rio swings on a vine to save her and Jeff shouts out to Rio, "Way to go, Rio! You're a real Errol Flynn!"
  • In the Spongebob Squarepants episode One Krabs Trash, Mr. Krabs battles a hoarde of zombie fish to swashbuckling music and using a swordfish skull as a weapon. He shouts triumphantly "Look at me, I'm Errol Fin!"

Filmography

Trivia

External links

1909 births | 1959 deaths | Australian film actors | American film actors | Deaths from cardiovascular disease | Entertainers who died in their 50s | Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery | Irish Australians | People from Tasmania | Western movie actors | Film actors

Errol Flynn | Errol Flynn | Errol Flynn | Errol Flynn | Errol Flynn | Errol Flynn | エロール・フリン | Errol Flynn | Errol Flynn | Errol Flynn | Errol Flynn

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Errol Flynn".

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