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Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn was an Australian film actor, most famous for his romantic swashbuckler roles in Hollywood films and his flamboyant lifestyle.
Born in Hobart, Tasmania, he was taken to Sydney, Australia as a child, where he attended Sydney Church of England Grammar School from which he was expelled for fighting. He was also expelled from the next school he attended. At age 15, he found work as a shipping clerk in Sydney, and the following year he sailed to New Guinea to work in the government service, but the daily grind proved not to the adventuresome Flynn's taste, so he took off to prospect for gold. In 1930, Flynn returned to Sydney and purchased a boat, and he and three friends embarked upon a seven-month voyage to New Guinea where he bought a tobacco plantation, a business which failed. A copper mining venture in the hills near the Laloki Valley behind the present national capital Port Moresby also failed.
In 1933, he starred in the Australian-made film In The Wake Of The Bounty directed by Charles Chauvel. In the early 1930s, Flynn 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 performed 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 actor.
 Errol Flynn is considered the greatest movie swashbuckler of the sound period. Flynn became an overnight sensation with his first starring role, Captain Blood, in 1935. He became typecast as a swashbuckler and made a host of such films, including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Dawn Patrol (1938) with his friend David Niven, Dodge City (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), and 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). Film historian Rudy Behlmer asserted that during the filming of Robin Hood de Havilland and Flynn were romantically involved (see the Special Edition of Robin Hood on DVD, 2003), but de Havilland herself has disputed this. Their relationship was, she said in an interview for Turner Classic Movies, platonic, mostly because Flynn was already married to Lili Damita.
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. Their off-screen fights were, in later years, reconciled.
Flynn was famous for his drinking, womanizing and brawling. His freewheeling, hedonistic lifestyle caught up with him in November 1942 when teenagers Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee accused him of statutory rape. A group was 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 ladies' man, which led to the popular belief that the term "in like Flynn" was based on Flynn's romantic exploits.
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 in the English language by author Benjamin S. Johnson as "Errolesque" in his treatise on the subject, An Errolesque Philosophy on Life.
While Flynn's pictures continued to score at the box office, the actor, himself, was declining; already demoralized by his inability to fight in World War II due to a variety of health problems -- including recurring malaria, tuberculosis, and a bad heart -- Flynn's drinking and carousing increased, and, although he remained a loyal and good friend to his cronies, the actor's overall behavior became erratic.
By the 1950s, Flynn had become 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 colorful 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 television mini-series based on Flynn's autobiography, starring Duncan Regehr as Flynn.
In the 1950s, Flynn tried his hand as a novelist, writing 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).
Flynn became an American citizen in 1942. In Hollywood he tended to refer to himself as Irish rather than Australian. His father Theodore Thomson Flynn was a biologist and a professor at the Queen's University of Belfast in Ireland for the latter part of his career.
Flynn lived with Patrice Wymore in Port Antonio, Jamaica in the 1950s. He was responsible for developing tourism to this area, popularising raft trips down rivers on bamboo rafts.
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, and cast in his final film, Cuban Rebel Girls (1959). He planned to marry her and move to their new house in Jamaica, but during a trip together 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).
Numerous legends surround Flynn's death. According to Vancouverhistory.ca, Flynn flew with Aadland to Vancouver British Columbia October 9, 1959 to sell his yacht Zaca to millionaire George Caldough. On October 14, Caldough was driving Flynn to the airport when Flynn felt ill. He was taken to the apartment of Caldough's friend, Dr. Grant Gould, uncle of noted pianist Glenn Gould. A party ensued, with Flynn regaling guests with stories and impressions. Feeling ill again, he announced "I shall return" and retired to a bedroom to rest. A half hour later, Aadland checked in on him, finding him suffering a massive heart attack. He died in her arms minutes later. According to the Vancouver Sun (12/16/2006), "When Errol Flynn came to town in 1959 for a week-long binge that ended with him dying in a West End apartment, his local friends propped him up at the Hotel Georgia lounge so that everyone would see him."
He was 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.
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. Some of these allegations appear to be substantiated by declassified FBI records -- particularly references to his close friend, Dr. Herman Erben, whom the FBI had deported from the U.S. in 1940 for espionage activities.
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 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 firsthand. 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.
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