What was errol flynn really like

Suffice to say, the Hollywood stars of the golden age were so beautiful that they could have had anyone and, thanks to studio system protection, could do so without fear of scandal. Books and documentaries have been made about the house on Mulholland Drive that Flynn built as his Hollywood pleasure palace. Flynn dated his Hollywood demise to the rape trial, even though he admitted that initially 'the whole country seemed to get amusement out of it and my box-office appeal [temporarily] went up'.

He ungallantly blamed his old flame Ann Sheridan for his increasing reliance on vodka at the time to get him on set. His drinking dominated and I suspect drugs too. His debts grew, his wives, he'd say, were like shackles. And he was finding it hard to face a camera. She too, as the director told me, was 'lapping up the sauce'. He came to me and said, 'Kid, write it fast. They're not drinking. It was pure proof vodka.

Flynn called alcohol 'one of the slowest though most certain forms of suicide' and it would take him a further 12 years to die of it. Flynn enjoyed a comeback in Hollywood in the late '50s, effectively playing himself - a bloated, alcoholic, ageing Romeo - in critically acclaimed films such as The Sun Also Rises and Too Much, Too Soon when he played his late idol and friend, alcoholic actor John Barrymore. He was even in talks with Stanley Kubrick to star as Vladimir Nabokov's most infamous paedophile in Lolita Perhaps it was a mercy that Flynn died two years before the picture went into production.

Fortuitous, too, was the failure of a self-financed film biopic of William Tell to be shot in Switzerland that Flynn was long past playing. Longstreet offered maybe the most perceptive epitaph for Flynn who died, aged 50, with a body bloated with booze and years of abuse: 'It was clear to many of us that he was the victim, rather than the conqueror, of women. They bilked him, married him, preyed on him. He also married three women, carried on an on-again off-again relationship with another, fathered four children, and kept a pet dog who, like his master, seemed to live by his own rules.

Though he's forever associated with a strictly American industry, which is to say, the Hollywood movie industry of the early 20th century, Errol Flynn wasn't actually an American. He was Australian. And also British, and also Irish, in a manner of speaking.

As he noted in his autobiography , Flynn was born and raised in a suburb of Hobart, Tasmania. He described his mother's side of the family as "seafaring folk," possibly instilling in him a genetic love of the sea that informed his later passion for boats. Flynn also claimed, without evidence, that he was descended from the HMS Bounty mutineers, perhaps in a bit of fictitious self-promotion intended to portray him as descended from hellraisers and miscreants. His parents, though Australian-born like him, were of Irish descent; indeed, that Irish ancestry would later be used by Warner Brothers to promote him as "the Irish leading man of the London stage," according to Film Ink.

Flynn traveled around the world as his life and early career unfolded, spending time in Australia, New Guinea and England and trying various careers, before catching the acting bug. It didn't take long for Flynn to develop a "bad boy" reputation as a hard partier and a womanizer.

The list of women who supposedly jumped into and out of Flynn's bed included the names of many of Hollywood's leading ladies at the time. He was also a braggart who constantly advertised his sexual prowess and peccadilloes.

He was charged with two counts of statutory rape involving two year-old girls. While he admitted to a consensual encounter with accuser Peggy Satterlee, he claimed to barely know accuser Betty Hansen.

The trial was a media sensation, and Flynn became a national joke—and an even bigger sex symbol. Satterlee testified that Flynn kept his shoes on during their encounter, a perfect joke, since his film They Died with Their Boots On had just been released.

Day by day I passed by her and watched how she sold chewing gum…. Flynn was acquitted, but he had in no way learned his lesson. Used by the studio. Used to make money. Used by the press for fun. Used by society as a piece of chalk to provide the world with a dab of color. With his third wife, Patrice, and baby daughter in tow, Flynn lived aboard his beloved yacht, Zaca, in the Mediterranean, diving, swimming, and drinking with the likes of Rita Hayworth, King Farouk of Egypt, and Prince Rainier.

I had pals. They had yachts. He tried going to school again, at the Sydney Church of England Grammar School but was again expelled, allegedly for having sex with the school laundress. After that, he worked as a clerk but soon lost the job for stealing petty cash. Being handsome and charismatic brought Flynn to the world of cinema. In , he appeared in a low budget Australian movie In the Wake of the Bounty as an amateur actor in the lead role as Christian Fletcher.

However, it was obvious to everyone, mostly to Flynn himself that he lacked a lot of knowledge and acting skills. Errol Flynn at the age of nine, as a page boy in the Queen Carnival pageant held in Burnie, Tasmania. On his right is Enid Lyons, who would later become the first woman elected to the Australian House of Representatives. Determined to succeed, Errol sailed back to England where he trained at the Northampton Repertory Company for seven months.

Unsurprisingly, he was dismissed after a fight with a female stage manager that involved her falling down some stairs.