Errol Flynn
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Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, one of his most famous roles |
Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn (
June 20,
1909 â€"
October 14,
1959) was an
Australian film actor, most famous for his romantic
swashbuckler roles and flamboyant lifestyle.
Born in
Hobart,
Tasmania, 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.
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 (1936),
The Adventures of Robin Hood,
Dodge City,
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 materialise when Davis declined to work with Flynn.
Flynn was well known for drinking, womanising 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 organised 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 ladies' man, and the term "in like Flynn" came to be synonymous with succeeding in romantic endeavours.
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 immortalised into the English language by author Benjamin S Johnson as "Errolesque" in his treatise on the subject, An Errolesque Philosophy on Life. [
1]
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 exaggerated autobiography,
My Wicked, Wicked Ways, was published just months after his death and contains humorous anecdotes about Hollywood. Flynn wanted to call the book
In Like Me, but the publisher refused. In 1984,
CBS produced a televison mini-series based on Flynn's autobiography, starring
Duncan Regehr.
In the 1950s, Flynn tried his hand as a novelist, penning the adventure novel
Showdown, which was published in 1952.
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, 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, the 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 50. 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. Both his parents survived him.
Flynn received American citizenship in 1942. In Hollywood he tended to refer to himself as Irish rather than Australian, supposedly because 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.
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 1930s Hollywood actor who spied for the Nazis in an obvious reference to Higham's allegations about Errol Flynn.
Subsequent biographiesâ€"notably Tony Thomas'
Errol Flynn: The Spy Who Never Was (Citadel, 1990)â€"have denounced Higham's claims as fabrications. Flynn's political leanings appear to be leftist. 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 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.
One of the best works about Flynn is Buster Wiles'
My Days With Errol Flynn: The Autobiography of a Stuntman (Roundtable, 1988). Wiles (died July 20, 1990), was a famous Hollywood stuntman and knew Flynn well. He worked with him in many pictures and became one of his best friends. For a while, he lived with Flynn at his Mulholland Farm. In his autobiography, Wiles recounts several humorous stories that reveal Flynn's personality and character. He dismissed allegations that Flynn was a Nazi spy or a homosexual.
*In popular music, Flynn was the inspiration for the song
Errol by the 1980s 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 called
Errol Flynn.
*Turner Classic Movies' 2004 production of
The Adventures of Errol Flynn. is widely regarded as the best documentary on his life.
*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
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!"
*According to long-time Hollywood gossip, Errol Flynn was exceptionally "well endowed", and this has added to his cultish mystique and become something of a common pop culture reference. For example, in his comic novel
High Fidelity, author
Nick Hornby talks about how it's possible for normal men to succeed romantically without necessarily possessing particular attributes: "Are they all as rich as Croesus, as charming as Clark Gable, as preposterously endowed as Errol Flynn, as witty as Oscar Wilde? Nope." Similarly, the
1946 Daffy Duck cartoon
Hollywood Daffy features a scene where Daffy Duck poses as a movie director and asks a
Warner Bros. studio guard "what has Errol Flynn got that you haven't got?", before quickly turning to the audience and saying "don't answer that!"—a blatant reference to Flynn's alleged penis size. Even today this is still considered an unusually risquĂ© joke for an animated family picture.
*In his 1980 short-story collection
Music for Chameleons, author
Truman Capote recounts a conversation he had with
Marilyn Monroe in which Monroe refers to once attending a Hollywood party where Errol Flynn entertained guests by playing "You Are My Sunshine" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" on a piano using only his penis.
*Flynn is mentioned in the song
"I Hope I Didn't Just Give Away the Ending" by
New Radicals.
*Flynn is mentioned in the song
Errol Flynn found on the 1989 Dogs D'Amour album "A Graveyard of Empty Bottles". To quote, "I want to be like Errol Flynn, Captain Blood was a whore".
In the Wake of the Bounty (
1933)
Murder at Monte Carlo (
1934)
A Dream Comes True (
1935) (short subject)
Captain Blood 1935
Don't Bet on Blondes 1935
Pirate Party on Catalina Isle 1935 (short subject)
The Case of the Curious Bride 1935
The Charge of the Light Brigade (
1936)
Another Dawn (
1937)
Green Light 1937
The Perfect Specimen 1937
The Prince and the Pauper 1937
Four's a Crowd (
1938)
The Adventures of Robin Hood 1938
The Dawn Patrol 1938
The Sisters 1938
Breakdowns of 1938 1938 (short subject)
For Auld Lang Syne 1938 (short subject)
Dodge City (
1939)
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex 1939
Santa Fe Trail (
1940)
The Sea Hawk 1940
Virginia City 1940
Dive Bomber (
1941)
Footsteps in the Dark 1941
They Died with Their Boots On 1941
Desperate Journey (
1942)
Gentlemen Jim 1942
Edge of Darkness (
1943)
Northern Pursuit 1943
Show Business at War 1943 (short subject)
Thank Your Lucky Stars 1943
Uncertain Glory (
1944)
Objective, Burma! (
1945)
San Antonio 1945
Never Say Goodbye (
1946)
Cry Wolf (
1947)
Escape Me Never 1947
Silver River (
1948)
The Adventures of Don Juan 1948
It's a Great Feeling (
1949) (Cameo)
That Forsyte Woman 1949
Kim (
1950)
Montana 1950
Rocky Mountain 1950
Hello God (
1951) (also producer)
Adventures of Captain Fabian 1951
Against All Flags (
1952)
Mara Maru 1952
Cruise of the Zaca 1952 (short subject) (also director)
Deep Sea Fishing 1952 (short subject) (also director)
The Master of Ballantrae (
1953)
William Tell 1953 (unfinished)
Crossed Swords (
1954)
King's Rhapsody (
1955)
Lilacs in the Spring 1955
The Dark Avenger 1955
Istanbul (
1957)
The Big Boodle 1957
The Sun Also Rises 1957
The Roots of Heaven (
1958)
Too Much, Too Soon 1958
Cuban Rebel Girls (
1959) (documentary)
Errol Flynn was portrayed by
Duncan Regehr in the TV movie
My Wicked, Wicked Ways, based on Flynn's autobiography.
Portrayed by
Jude Law in
Martin Scorsese's
The Aviator.''
* Errol Flynn's grandson,
Sean Flynn-Amir currently stars in the
Nickelodeon TV Show
Zoey 101.
* Flynn's height was 6'2" (1.88 m).
*"I've had a hell of a lot of fun. I've loved it, every minute of it" - Errol Flynn's last words.
* Flynn's shipboard flogging, which constitutes the opening scene in 1952's "Against All Flags," ranks 27th in the book, "Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies."
*
Rory Flynn's site on Errol*
Errol Flynn Tribute Site*
Biography and Pictures*
Classic Movies (1939 - 1969): Errol Flynn*
Rotten.com's Profile of Flynn*
Errol Flynn's Gravesite*
Errol Flynn on CBC's Front Page Challenge
