Errol Flynn(1909–1959)

Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn was born at the Queen Alexandra Hospital, Hobart on 20 June 1909, only son of Theodore Thomson Flynn, a Tasmanian-born Australian marine-biologist and senior University of Tasmania zoology-department lecturer (later Professor of Biology at Queen's University Belfast from 1931 to 1948), and Marelle Young, an Irish-Australian Hobart-Catholic teacher. The household was lower-middle-class Tasmanian-Australian intellectual: the father at the Queen's College, University of Tasmania, on the academic-zoology lecturer's salary, the mother running the Hobart-Anglican parish-school teacher's career, and the boy raised at the Battery Point Hobart house through the first ten years of his life. He was schooled at the Hobart Friends' School (a Quaker-coeducational small Tasmanian school) from six, then at the Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) on a open scholarship at twelve, and was expelled from Shore at fourteen in 1923 on the disciplinary-offence small theft-and-fornication accusations that the small school-records preserved as the foundation of his subsequent personal-character public-image.

He drifted across the western Pacific through his late teens and early twenties on a series of small adventurer-and-rogue jobs that the subsequent press-publicity small autobiography (the 1959 *My Wicked, Wicked Ways* small memoir) ran through the Hollywood-publicity small register of the later career. He worked at the Inchcape-and-Burns-Philp shipping-line small clerical post at Sydney 1925-26, at the Wahgi Valley gold-prospecting small operation at New Guinea 1926-30, and at the Royal Australian Navy Reserve small enlisted-rating-post at Sydney 1927-29; the early-1930s period took him through small Java, small Manila, small Singapore and small Bombay on small intermittent shipping-and-mining-and-newspaper-correspondent small short-term small employment-and-rumoured-small-crime small itinerant-life. The small late-1933 small recruitment to the Northampton Repertory small English-stage acting career came on the recommendation of the Hollywood-and-London director Cy Endfield who had met him at small Bombay in early 1933 on a reportorial-assignment.

He moved to England in 1933 at twenty-four on the Repertory-Theatre small Northampton small Cy Endfield scholarship, took the Northampton small classical-stage-apprenticeship period across 1933-34, played small theatre work at Northampton, then at the Coventry Repertory and finally at the Birmingham Repertory across 1934, and was cast at small Birmingham in early 1935 in a Warner-Brothers small London-studio small screen test by the Warner small London casting-director Irving Asher. The small screen test landed him a Warner contract at $150 a week from May 1935; he sailed for New York on small 6 June 1935 and reached Los Angeles on small 12 June 1935.

*Captain Blood* (Warner Brothers, 26 December 1935), the Michael Curtiz-directed adaptation of Rafael Sabatini's 1922 small pirate novel about a Cromwellian-era Irish-Catholic small Caribbean-pirate-by-circumstance Captain Peter Blood, gave him the breakthrough lead at twenty-six. The small *Captain Blood* film was a commercial sensation across the 1935-36 small holiday small box-office period and made him, by mid-1936, the Warner-Brothers small swashbuckling-leading-man small star of the late-1930s decade. The small Warner-Brothers small leading-man small period across the 1935 to 1942 small seven-year period produced the swashbuckling-Hollywood-canon roles: *The Charge of the Light Brigade* (1936), *The Prince and the Pauper* (1937), *The Adventures of Robin Hood* (1938, the Curtiz-Keighley small classic-Hollywood-Errol-Flynn-Robin-Hood small canonical role), *The Sea Hawk* (1940), *They Died with Their Boots On* (1941, the George Armstrong Custer biography), and *Gentleman Jim* (1942, the James J. Corbett-boxer biography).

The small February 1943 small statutory-rape trial of the Hollywood-and-Hollywood-Boulevard small celebrity-criminal small case was the public-personal-reputation small inflection-point of his career. He was charged with two small statutory-rape counts in November 1942 with the teenage-women small Betty Hansen and small Peggy Satterlee, both small under-eighteen at the alleged-encounter time, was tried at the Los Angeles County Superior Court across February 1943, and was acquitted by the small jury on both counts on 6 February 1943 after a two-hour deliberation. The small ‘in like Flynn’ small popular-American-language phrase (a descriptor of small easy-sexual-access) emerged from the trial-and-acquittal small public-publicity small period and remained in the American vernacular for the subsequent half-century. The small remainder of the 1940s career across the post-trial decade was a commercial decline: the Warner-Brothers small post-1945 small post-war contract-renegotiation small period gave him a reduced-fee small contract through 1952, his drinking through the 1945-1959 small period accelerated, his two small marriages of the period (Lili Damita 1935-42; Nora Eddington 1943-49; Patrice Wymore from 1950) ended in small acrimonious-divorce-settlements, and his late-1950s small Caribbean-and-Mediterranean small expatriate small period was the substance-abuse small final-decline of the career. He died of a small massive heart attack at the Vancouver West End apartment of the Doctor Grant Gould on 14 October 1959, fifty years old, after a Vancouver-yacht-purchase trip. He is buried at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California. The Flynn name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Ó Floinn* (descendant of Flann, the Gaelic *flann* of small ruddy-or-reddish complexion byname), the foundational small medieval Roscommon-and-east-Connacht small surname; he carried the Tasmanian-Hobart-marine-biologist's-son variant of it into the swashbuckling-Hollywood lead of the late-1930s and 1940s small Warner-Brothers small classical-Hollywood era.