Errol Flynn

• Born: June 20, 1909
• Birthplace: Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
• Died: October 14, 1959
• Place of death: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Identification Australian-born film star

In his film roles and in his publicized personal life, Flynn embodied the concept of gallantry in its various senses of valiant selflessness, nonchalance, and random amorousness. His films dramatized the first two senses; his publicized antics evoked the third sense, giving the public a salacious slant to the phrase “in like Flynn.”

During the 1940’s, Errol Flynn reflected the distinction he had achieved as a film star during the 1930’s, when he had played the romantically adventurous swashbuckler in Captain Blood (1935) and The Prince and the Pauper (1937); the gallant, self-sacrificing military hero in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and The Dawn Patrol (1938); the righteously gallant and lighthearted outlaw of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); and a lighthearted but serious-minded lawman in Dodge City (1939). His portrayal of a tragically gallant Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, in Elizabeth and Essex (1939) has come to be recognized as a masterly performance.

It was during the 1940’s that Flynn’s recognition as a Hollywood star and his reputation as an off-screen rakehell combined to produce an image of invincible charm and flamboyant sensuality. He appeared, during this decade, in twenty-two films, seven of which fully captured and sustained the essence of his stardom: The Sea Hawk and Santa Fe Trail (both in 1940), Dive Bomber (1941), They Died with Their Boots On and Gentleman Jim (both in 1942), Objective Burma!(1945), and, in the role he had become considered as born to play, The Adventures of Don Juan (1949).

Off-screen, Flynn’s marital changes during this period were punctuated by a sensational trial. His marriage to the volatile Lili Damita, who bore him a son, Sean, ended in 1942. In November of that year, Flynn was accused of statutory rape. The charge was made by seventeen-year-old Betty Hansen, who claimed to have been violated by Flynn during a party at a Bel Air mansion. A concurrent charge, by sixteen-year-old Peggy LaRue Satterlee, held that Flynn had forced her into sexual intercourse twice aboard his yacht. Jerry Giesler, Flynn’s defense attorney, convinced a jury of nine women and three men that both plaintiffs were, despite their youth, sophisticated pleasure-seekers and fortune-hunters. Flynn was fully acquitted in February, 1943. Then, during the following October, twenty-one-year-old Shirley Evans Hassau brought a paternity suit against him. Three years earlier, Flynn had paid Hassau and her mother $2,000 to settle a sexual assault case that the mother had initiated. He denied fathering Hassau’s two-year-old daughter; the case, after intermittent proceedings, was dropped ten years later.

After the rape trial, Flynn married Nora Eddington, who bore him two daughters, Deirdre and Rory. This marriage ended in 1949. In 1950, Flynn married his third and last wife, the film star Patrice Wymore; she presented him with his third daughter, Arnella. He sought a divorce from Wymore in 1958, reportedly to be free to wed the seventeen-year-old Beverly Aadland. However, Wymore, avoiding this action, soon became his widow.

In Errol Flynn: The Untold Story (1980), Charles Higham attempts to expose Flynn as a bisexual (having affairs with, for example, Truman Capote and Tyrone Power) and as a spy for the Nazi Gestapo. Attorney Marvin Belli filed suit against Higham on behalf of Flynn’s daughters, and Wymore described Higham’s charges as ludicrous. Tony Thomas convincingly repudiates and disproves Higham’s contentions in Errol Flynn: The Spy Who Never Was (1990).

The darker side of Flynn’s gallantry is apparent from his critically praised roles, each as an unregenerate but noble drunk, in The Sun Also Rises (1957), Too Much Too Soon (1958), and The Roots of Heaven (1958).

Impact

In The Two Lives of Errol Flynn (1978), Michael Freeland analyzes the legendary impact created by Flynn through “raucous high living and cinematic heroism.” One must go on to note that the combination of Flynn’s effortless nobility of character in the seven films he made with Olivia De Havilland and the three he made with Alexis Smith and the perverse amorousness and willful bibulousness of his personal life came to be received in America not as contradictory but as stimulatingly complementary.

Bibliography

Aadland, Florence, with Lisa Janssen. The Beautiful Pervert. Chicago: Novel Books, 1965.

Freeland, Michael. The Two Lives of Errol Flynn. New York: William Morrow, 1978.

Thomas, Tony, ed. From a Life of Adventure: The Writings of Errol Flynn. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1980.

Valenti, Peter. Errol Flynn: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.