Errol
Leslie Thomson Flynn (June 20, 1909–October 14,
1959), was an Australian-American film actor born in
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, most famous for his romantic
swashbuckler roles.
As a child he was taken to Sydney,
Australia, where he attended two schools and was expelled
from both. Shortly afterwards he moved to New Guinea,
where he owned a tobbaco plantation until it went
under. 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 Theatre,
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. After gaining this experience
in the acting trade, he moved to Hollywood looking
for film work.
Although he had not really planned
an acting career, Flynn became a star with his third
film, Captain Blood, in 1935. He became typecast as
a swashbuckler and made several such films including
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) (widely regarded
as his best film in this genre and an acknowledged
Hollywood classic) The Sea Hawk (1940), and The Adventures
of Don Juan (1948). He also played opposite Olivia
de Havilland in the western Dodge City (1939). Overall,
Flynn appeared in eight films with de Havilland.
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 Brothers 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,
each declined to work with the other on the project.
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. His suave, debonnaire, 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." [1]
By the 1950s, Flynn was something
of a self-parody: heavy alcohol and drug abuse left
him prematurely aged and bloated in his final years.
But he still won acclaim as a drunken ne'er-do-well
in The Sun Also Rises (1957). His somewhat unreliable
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.
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, he 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, sometime
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 after a life of alcohol abuse
and drug addiction, at the age of 45.
Errol Flynn died of a massive heart
attack at the home of a friend 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.
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, but 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 appeared to be of a leftist
bent; he was a supporter of the Spanish Republic in
the Spanish Civil War and of the Cuban Revolution.
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. Additionally, the Jay-Z
song "Cashmere Thoughts" from the album
Reasonable Doubt contains the line: "Errol Flynn
/ Hot like Heroin."
The screen swashbuckler-as-Nazi-spy
trope is present in Joe Johnson's film "The Rocketeer,"
with Timothy Dalton as a mustachioed hunk-traitor.
See also Rafael Sabatini, author of
the novels The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood, for the
roots of Flynn's screen image.
Filmography
In the Wake of the Bounty (1933) (Australian)
Murder at Monte Carlo (1935)
The Case of the Curious Bride (1935)
Don't Bet on Blondes (1935)
Captain Blood (1936)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1935)
Green Light (1937)
The Prince and the Pauper (1937)
Another Dawn (1937)
The Perfect Specimen (1937)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Four's a Crowd (1938)
The Sisters (1938)
The Dawn Patrol (1938)
Dodge City (1939)
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)
Virginia City (1940)
The Sea Hawk (1940)
Santa Fe Trail (1940)
The Roots of Heaven (1958)
Cuban Story (1959) (documentary) (narrator)
Cuban Rebel Girls (1959)
source from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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