Hobart, Tasmania · 1909 – 1959

Errol Flynn

The Tasmanian who came to Hollywood by way of the New Guinea goldfields, the Spanish Civil War, and a ship he named for himself — then became the greatest swashbuckler the screen has ever produced and proceeded to live a life of such extravagant chaos that it eventually became the thing everyone talked about instead of the films.

50
Film
Credits
1938
Robin Hood —
His Finest Year
50
Age at
Death
Errol Flynn — painted portrait Portrait · Errol Flynn
Biography

From Tasmania to Sherwood Forest

Born Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn on June 20, 1909, in Hobart, Tasmania — the son of a marine biologist. He was expelled from multiple schools, worked the New Guinea goldfields, tried tobacco farming, sailed a yacht to New Guinea, and arrived in England in the early 1930s having done more living than most actors manage in a career. He appeared on the London stage, was spotted by a Warner Bros. talent scout, and arrived in Hollywood in 1935 with a physical presence and an ease of movement that the camera registered as something approaching miracle.

Warner Bros. cast him as the lead in Captain Blood (1935) when Robert Donat withdrew — his first major film, a pirate adventure that made him a star overnight. The partnership with director Michael Curtiz and co-star Olivia de Havilland produced a run of films — The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Sea Hawk (1940) — that constitutes the greatest body of swashbuckling cinema ever made.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is his masterwork and cinema's — shot in three-strip Technicolor by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, it remains the definitive screen adaptation of the legend and the film against which all subsequent versions are measured. Flynn's Robin is not performed but inhabited: the physical joy of the role is entirely visible, the swordfight with Basil Rathbone's Guy of Gisbourne is among cinema's finest action sequences, and the easy charm that makes Robin's leadership credible is Flynn himself rather than a character he was playing.

His off-screen life — the drinking, the womanising, the litigation, the autobiography, the yacht named Zaca on which he spent the last years — eventually overwhelmed the films in the public memory. He died in Vancouver on October 14, 1959, aged fifty, his body aged far beyond its years. The phrase "in like Flynn" had entered the language; the films that justified it are considerably finer than the phrase suggests.

1909
Born in Hobart, Tasmania; expelled from several schools
1930s
New Guinea goldfields; tobacco farming; sailing; London stage
1935
Captain Blood — star overnight; Curtiz; de Havilland
1936
The Charge of the Light Brigade — heroic peak of war films
1938
The Adventures of Robin Hood — cinema's greatest swashbuckler
1942
Gentleman Jim — his finest dramatic performance
1959
Dies in Vancouver, age 50; the body finished before the spirit
Filmography

From Captain Blood to Robin Hood

1938Swashbuckler · Adventure · Technicolor
The Adventures of Robin Hood
Michael Curtiz and William Keighley's definitive Robin Hood — Flynn as Robin of Loxley, in three-strip Technicolor, leading Sherwood Forest's outlaws against Prince John and Guy of Gisbourne. The most purely joyful adventure film ever made, and the one all subsequent Robins are measured against.

Flynn's Robin does not perform the role — he inhabits it so completely that the pleasure is entirely visible, which is precisely what the character requires. A Robin Hood who seems to be making an effort is already wrong. The swordfight with Basil Rathbone's Guy of Gisbourne — choreographed over weeks, performed with total commitment — is the finest action sequence of the studio era.

1935Pirate Adventure · Drama · Debut
Captain Blood
Michael Curtiz's pirate adventure — Flynn as Peter Blood, the Irish physician enslaved and turned pirate who becomes the Caribbean's most dangerous sea captain. His Hollywood debut, made at twenty-six, opposite Olivia de Havilland; the film that created the partnership.

Captain Blood requires Flynn to carry two hours of adventure on the strength of his physical presence and charm alone — there is no character to speak of, only a man to embody — and he does it with the ease of someone for whom inhabiting heroic space is the most natural thing in the world. The film essentially invented the template his next decade would follow.

1942Drama · Biography · Boxing
Gentleman Jim
Raoul Walsh's biographical boxing film — Flynn as James J. Corbett, the San Francisco bank clerk who became heavyweight champion of the world through scientific boxing. His finest dramatic performance, showing the range the adventure films never needed to use.

Corbett is Flynn with the myth removed — a man who needs to earn his heroism rather than wear it by nature, whose charm is defensive rather than inherent. The performance shows what a director with patience and an actor willing to work beneath the surface could produce. It is the film that proves Flynn was more than his image.

1940Naval · Adventure · Epic
The Sea Hawk
Michael Curtiz's naval adventure — Flynn as Sir Geoffrey Thorpe, the English privateer whose raids on Spanish shipping serve both commerce and crown. The last of the great Curtiz-Flynn collaborations: large-scale, dramatically confident, and fuelled by Flynn at his physical peak.

The Sea Hawk benefits from a moral seriousness the earlier adventure films sometimes lack — Thorpe is fighting for something larger than himself, and Flynn's natural heroism acquires a weight it hadn't always carried. The galley sequence, shot with genuine physical hardship, is the film's finest and most physically honest achievement.

"

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.

— Errol Flynn
Career

The Greatest Swashbuckler — Undisputed Since 1938

AFI Greatest Male Legends
1999
18th Greatest Male Legend
American Film Institute recognised him among the greatest male screen legends — the adventures justified by the ranking
AFI Legend #18
Hollywood Walk of Fame
1960
Star on Hollywood Boulevard
Posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — the industry's recognition that the life and the films had both been extraordinary
Walk of Fame
The Curtiz Collaboration
1935–1941
Captain Blood · Robin Hood · Sea Hawk
Three of cinema's greatest adventure films with director Michael Curtiz — a partnership that defined the genre for all subsequent practitioners
Defining Partnership
The de Havilland Partnership
1935–1941
Eight Films Together
Eight films with Olivia de Havilland — the finest romantic screen partnership of the adventure genre, unrepeated in the decades since
8 Films Together
Artistic Identity

The Joy That Couldn't Be Performed, Only Lived

The Physical Grace
Flynn's movement — on a horse, with a sword, running across a castle courtyard — had the quality of natural ease that cannot be taught to an actor who doesn't possess it. The New Guinea years, the sailing, the physical life before Hollywood had given him a body that moved with the authority of genuine experience.
The Curtiz Alliance
Michael Curtiz was a martinet who drove actors to their limits and sometimes beyond them — Flynn resisted, argued, and produced his finest work precisely in the resistance. Their relationship was combative and the films were magnificent. The collaboration required both qualities.
The Life
He sailed to New Guinea before Hollywood found him; he covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist; he owned yachts and raced them; he wrote an autobiography of such colourful implausibility that readers couldn't determine which parts were true. The life was the most elaborate performance of his career.
The Wasted Years
The decade after Robin Hood — the drinking that aged him, the litigation, the roles beneath his gifts — is the cautionary element of the Flynn story. Gentleman Jim showed what remained available to him; the decade that followed showed why it went largely unused. He died at fifty having used himself up.
Legacy

Robin Hood — The Film Nobody Has Bettered Since

Errol Flynn's legacy is The Adventures of Robin Hood and the question it raises — why has nobody made a better one in eighty-five years? The answer is that the film requires an actor of Flynn's specific combination of physical grace, natural charm, and evident joy in the role, and this combination has not reappeared in quite the same proportions. The film is not a tribute to what Hollywood could manufacture; it is a document of what Flynn actually was.

His death at fifty — the body finished before the talent — is Hollywood's most persistent might-have-been. Gentleman Jim showed what a mature Flynn, working with the right director and the right material, could produce. The question of what he might have done between fifty and sixty, had he survived, is one that nobody has been able to answer, because nobody with his specific gifts has emerged to demonstrate the possibilities.

AFI Male Screen Legend Rank
18th Greatest Male Screen Legend
#18
Films with Olivia de Havilland
The greatest adventure partnership
8
Years of Peak Career
Captain Blood to Gentleman Jim
7
Age at Death
October 14, 1959, Vancouver
50