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Errol Flynn

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Errol Flynn
Errol Flynn c.1940

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

Youth

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 getting in a lot of fights and a rumour of 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 fifth 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 television mini-series based on Flynn's autobiography, starring Duncan Regehr as Flynn.

In the 1950s, Flynn tried his hand as a novelist, penning the adventure novel Showdown, which was published in 1952.

File:Olivia DeHavilland Errol Flynn 1162r.jpg
Errol Flynn with his most frequent co-star, Olivia de Havilland, in The Charge of the Light Brigade

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, 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).

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.

Numerous legends surround Flynn's death, but 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.

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.

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.

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. Some of these allegations appear to be substantiated by declassified FBI records -- particularly references to his close friend, Dr. Herman Erban (see below), 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.

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. Other biographies have alleged that Flynn had brief affairs with Truman Capote, Tyrone Power, and Howard Hughes.

Pop culture references

  • In popular music, Flynn was the inspiration for the song "Errol" by the 1980s rock group Australian Crawl. It was a Top 20 hit in Australia 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.
  • 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.
  • The character Alan Swann in the film and Broadway musical My Favorite Year is inspired by Flynn.
  • 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 risqué joke for an animated family picture.
  • An alleged MI6 plot to undermine Flynn's career is depicted in Wu Ming's novel 54. This conspiracy theory is based upon speculation on Flynn's awareness (or lack thereof) that his German American friend Herman Erben (aka "Gerrit Koets" in My Wicked, Wicked Ways) was a Nazi spy. Flynn and Erben are also the main characters in Wu Ming's short story In Like Flynn (2006).
  • Flynn won $30,000 as a contestant on an American TV Quiz show of the 1950s. His specialist subject was Sailing.
  • Flynn's Robin Hood version of The Adventures of Robin Hood was parodied in The Mel Brooks film Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
  • Flynn is referenced by rapper Jay-Z in the song "Cashmere Thoughts" in the line: "the ghetto Errol Flynn, hot like heroin...".

Filmography

Trivia

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