- When banned from drinking on a film set, he would inject oranges with vodka and eat them during his breaks.
- His son Sean Flynn appeared in a few films but didn't particularly like being an actor. He switched careers and became a freelance photojournalist during the Vietnam War. He disappeared with another journalist as they followed the US Army invasion into Cambodia and both were thought to have been captured and executed by Khmer Rouge guerrillas. He is the subject of the 1981 The Clash song, "Sean Flynn.".
- He met his second wife while she was working at a snack counter in a courthouse during one of his rape trials.
- Mulholland Farm, his old house, was located at 3100 Torreyson Place off Mulholland Dr., overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Originally situated on 11-1/2 acres, the house was last occupied by Ricky Nelson, who bought it for $750,000 in 1980. His twin sons, Gunnar Nelson and ;Matthew Nelson', grew up in the house and were the last people to live in it. Unfortunately, due to years of neglect, the house and other structures (a pool, barn and a casino) were demolished in 1988 and sub-divided into several smaller parcels. Justin Timberlake owns the large compound at the top of the property at the end of Torreyson Drive. On the left is the original entrance to Flynn's property, Flynn Ranch Road, but it is now gated-closed. You can catch a glimpse of Mulholland Farm in its heyday at the beginning of the short film Cruise of the Zaca (1952). TCM shows it quite frequently as filler between movies.
- Although only 50, he succumbed to a massive heart attack at the apartment of Dr. Grant Gould in Vancouver, Canada, while he was there to sell his yacht (The Zaca) to an old friend, George Caldough. The yacht was his "pride and joy", but due to financial difficulties he was forced to sell it, despite having primarily lived on it during his final years. The autopsy showed he had the body of a 75-year-old man. His liver was so badly damaged that he could only have lived for another nine to 12 months.
- Once stated that his only regret was his non-participation in World War II.
- In the early days of establishing his Hollywood career, he passed himself off as Irish in the belief that few people knew of Australia. He was born, educated and began work in Australia, later drifting between Papua New Guinea and Sydney (rumoured to have been a fighter for PNG) before stumbling on to acting. The Australian film In the Wake of the Bounty (1933) captured some attention for him in the States and so, owing enormous debts to the Australian Taxation Office, he moved to America. He said to the ATO, "I'm willing to forget if you are".
- Often drank two or three quarts of vodka a day.
- Though Flynn did most of his own stunts in Against All Flags (1952), he balked at one suggestion involving sliding down and through a sail using a rapier blade, a stunt which was originated by Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate (1926); it was performed by a stunt double.
- His mother had Polynesian ancestry, from Tahiti, through her four great-grandmothers--the mutineers of HMS Bounty sailed from Tahiti to Pitcairn Island, taking some Tahitian women with them. As of 2005, there were an estimated 55 descendants of the mutineers still living on Pitcairn.
- Declaring to his second wife that he wanted to experience everything in life, he began dabbling in opium in the late 1940s and quickly became a full-fledged addict. His opium addiction and the effects of the alcohol that ravaged his body over the years contributed to his premature death in 1959 at only age 50.
- During the filming of They Died with Their Boots On (1941) Errol Flynn had an off-camera fight with the legendary Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was working an extra. Flynn, who was in his Custer uniform, was knocked out by Thorpe with one punch.
- He and Olivia de Havilland acted together in nine movies: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Dodge City (1939), Four's a Crowd (1938), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) and They Died with Their Boots On (1941).
- At his funeral on October 19, 1959, his bronze casket, covered with yellow roses, was carried from the Church of the Recessional at Forest Lawn, Glendale, CA, by Raoul Walsh, Mickey Rooney, Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams, Jack Oakie, Otto Reichow and Mike Romanoff.
- He appeared on the, May 23, 1938, cover of Life magazine and a copy of the same was placed in the Westinghouse Time Capsule, at the 1939 World's Fair, and it was declared that it would not to be opened for 50 centuries meaning that; he will be remembered for thousands of years to come.
- Nearly died from food poisoning after eating uncooked ground hamburger meat mixed with raw egg yolk early in 1959.
- In his book, "My Wicked Wicked Ways" he recounted that as a young man in Papua, New Guinea, he had many adventurous jobs as a gold prospector, slave recruiter, diamond smuggler and manager of coconut and tobacco plantations, just to name a few. He also spent a short time as a cadet patrol officer until it was discovered that he had misrepresented himself. Unfortunately, his time in New Guinea came with a price. While there he contracted malaria, which would plague him for the rest of his life. It has been a matter of dispute as to whether all his stories of adventure were true, but many have concluded that even if only 25% were true, he certainly had an amazing life.
- He was granted a 4-F deferment during World War II due to his weak heart, exacerbated by bouts of malaria and tuberculosis. During the filming of Gentleman Jim (1942) he suffered a mild heart attack.
- In the last two years of his life he caused a scandal by touring the world with his 15-year-old mistress Beverly Aadland, who was working as his secretary. Their affair was the subject of a 1961 book by Beverly's mother Florence Aadland entitled "The Big Love", which describes how she intentionally pushed her daughter into the affair with Flynn. This affair is the subject of the movie The Last of Robin Hood (2013).
- The underlying causes of his death were myocardial infarction, coronary thrombosis, coronary atherosclerosis, liver degeneration, liver sclerosis and diverticulitis of the colon.
- His performance as Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is ranked #16 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.
- A chain smoker, in the last year of his life he underwent hospital tests for throat cancer.
- His father was head of the zoology department at the University of Tasmania.
- Became seriously ill with liver failure in 1952 while filming The Story of William Tell (1953) in Rome.
- It was during a Parkinson (1971) interview that his good friend David Niven revealed that during the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Flynn was taking a break seated on a horse, while applying makeup with one hand and holding a mirror in the other. An extra, who witnessed the scene, assumed (like most of the people around) that Flynn was gay, and so he decided to "pock" the horse up the behind with his lance. The horse bucked, throwing Flynn to the ground. He got to his feet and asked who was responsible. The extra admitted guilt, thinking that it would only add to Flynn's embarrassment. However, Flynn instead dragged him from his horse and gave him a sound beating. They were the best of friends after that.
- He and director Michael Curtiz made some of their best pictures together, but they despised each other and fought constantly whenever they worked together. Ironically, his first wife Lili Damita was previously briefly married to Curtiz.
- Through his mother he was descended from the illegitimate daughter of an unknown mother and Sir Richard Neville, 6th Earl of Salisbury and 16th Earl Consort of Warwick, 181st Knight of the Garter. Neville in his turn was descended, through his mother, from Thomas Holland, a stepson of Edward "the Black Prince" Plantagenet, son of King Edward III of England and father of the later King Richard II. Flynn played the Black Prince in The Warriors (1955), commonly known in the US as "The Warriors".
- Probably his most uncharacteristic screen appearance occurred in Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) when he sang and danced his way through a pub number entitled "That's What You Jolly Well Get".
- Was tried for statutory rape in 1942 but was acquitted. The case spawned the term "In Like Flynn".
- It has been said that his 1959 autobiography, "My Wicked Wicked Ways," was originally to be called "In Like Me."
- In his final years he suffered from Buerger's disease, acute inflammation and thrombosis (clotting) of arteries and veins of the legs, hands and feet as a result of his excessive cigarette smoking.
- In the last year of his life he turned down an offer to star in a major swashbuckling series for US television in which he would play the same kind of character he had played in Captain Blood (1935), with younger stand-ins performing his stunts. "I knew it would be crap," he explained.
- While looking for native agricultural laborers in New Guinea in 1933, he was pursued and nearly captured by headhunters.
- Interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale, CA, in the Garden of Everlasting Peace.
- He is frequently mentioned in Marvel Comics' "X-Men" series as the idol of the character Nightcrawler.
- A recent Australian documentary on his life and career, narrated by Christopher Lee, included a film clip of Flynn being interviewed on his being nominated for the Academy Award for his critically acclaimed performance in The Sun Also Rises (1957). We are then told that the nomination "disappeared".
- His dream project was a biopic about the notorious Australian-Irish outlaw Ned Kelly, which was nearly produced by Warner Brothers in the mid 1940s.
- In his autobiography he claimed to be the great-great-great-great-grandson, via his mother's line, of HMS Bounty mutineer Midshipman Edward "Ned" Young, who went to Pitcairn with Fletcher Christian. Young had four children with Toofaiti--Nancy, George, Robert and William--and three more with Christian's widow Mauatua--Edward, Polly and Dorothea. Young's descendants still live on Pitcairn, Norfolk and in New Zealand. However, research suggests that Flynn's claims were not actually true. Flynn played Fletcher Christian in In the Wake of the Bounty (1933). He in fact the 23rd great-grandson of Robert De Vere. In addition, he was the 15th cousin twice removed of Olivia de Havilland, who played Maid Marian, his love interest, in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
- Kevin Kline plays Flynn in a motion-picture version of his affair with 15-year-old Beverly Aadland in The Last of Robin Hood (2013).
- Father with Nora Eddington of Deirdre Flynn (born January 10, 1945) and Rory Flynn (born March 12, 1947).
- In 1980, author Charles Higham published a controversial biography, "Errol Flynn: The Untold Story," in which he alleged that Flynn was a fascist sympathizer who spied for the Nazis before and during World War II. In Disney's film The Rocketeer (1991), the major villain, Neville Sinclair, was a 1930s Hollywood actor who spied for the Nazis, an obvious reference to Higham's allegations about Flynn. The book also alleged he was bisexual and had affairs with Tyrone Power, Howard Hughes and Truman Capote. Subsequent biographies - notably Tony Thomas' "Errol Flynn: The Spy Who Never Was" (1990) - have denounced Higham's claims as fabrications. Flynn's political beliefs appear to have been left-wing. He was a strong supporter of the Spanish Republic and a fervent opponent of ultra-conservative Gen. Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and was a supporter of Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba, even hosting a documentary titled The Truth About Fidel Castro Revolution (1959) shortly before his death. According to his own posthumous autobiography, "My Wicked, Wicked Ways", he admired Castro and considered him a personal friend.
- His father, Theodore Flynn, taught biology at Queens College, Belfast.
- He was Australian by birth. His genealogy shows both British and Irish descent.
- Father, with Lili Damita, of photojournalist Sean Flynn (1941-70).
- He has appeared in one film that has been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
- He was voted the 26th Greatest Movie Star of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
- He was considered for Leslie Howard's role in Gone with the Wind (1939). He was also at least nominally considered for the role of Rhett Butler, but GWTW producer David O. Selznick really wanted to cast Clark Gable all along.
- He was a friend of Hermann Erben--monkey expert, drug dealer, Adolf Hitler impersonator and German agent who voluntarily spent three years in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai.
- Although he played Anna Neagle's father in Let's Make Up (1954), he was almost five years her junior in real life.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content