Errol Flynn(1909–1959)

Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn was born at Hobart, Tasmania, on 20 June 1909, only son of Theodore Thomson Flynn, an Australian marine biologist and University of Tasmania zoologist, later Professor of Biology at Queen's University Belfast, and Marelle Young, an Irish-Australian teacher. He was schooled at the Hobart Friends' School and at Sydney Church of England Grammar School.

He spent his late teens and early twenties roaming the western Pacific on a string of adventurer's jobs, shipping clerk at Sydney, gold prospector in New Guinea, Royal Australian Navy reservist, with intermittent work through Java, Manila and Singapore, the picaresque early life the later Hollywood publicity made much of.

He came to England in 1933 on a repertory-theatre opening at Northampton, took the classical-stage apprenticeship through the Northampton, Coventry and Birmingham repertory companies across 1933-34, and was given a Warner Brothers screen test at Birmingham in early 1935. The test won him a Warner contract, and he sailed for Hollywood that June.

Captain Blood (Warner Brothers, December 1935), the Michael Curtiz adaptation of Rafael Sabatini's pirate novel, gave him the breakthrough lead at twenty-six and was a commercial sensation. He became the Warner Brothers swashbuckling leading man of the late 1930s, in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Prince and the Pauper (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), the canonical Hollywood Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk (1940), They Died with Their Boots On (1941) and Gentleman Jim (1942).

He went on working through the 1940s and 1950s on screen and on a Caribbean-and-Mediterranean expatriate life, and died at Vancouver on 14 October 1959, fifty years old. He is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, was given a posthumous Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 1960, and his memoir My Wicked, Wicked Ways was published the same year. The Flynn name, the Roscommon-and-east-Connacht patronymic Ó Floinn, he carried from a Tasmanian marine-biologist's family into the swashbuckling Hollywood lead of the classical-Warner-Brothers era.