![]() ![]() "Robin Hood" proved his blockbuster, shot in Technicolor and costing an unheard-of $2 million, but making a then-impressive $4 million at the box office. He and Curtiz would do more pat Westerns such as "Dodge City" (1939) and even comedies such as "Four's a Crowd" (1938), but costume adventures would be the Flynn trademark, the likes of "The Prince and the Pauper" (1937), "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" (1939), and another pirate outing, "The Sea Hawk" (1940), all featuring him at his dashing, fencing, anti-authoritarian best (in "Robin Hood," when de Havilland's Marian charges him with speaking treason, Flynn's title character giddily retorts, "Fluently!"). "Santa Fe Trail" (1940) and "They Died With Their Boots On" would be similarly cavalier, the first a sanitized, racially condescending account of future Civil War f s Jeb Stuart (Flynn) and George Custer (Ronald Reagan) tracking down terroristic abolitionist John Brown the second canonizing Custer (Flynn this time) amid his (historically less-than-heroic) Indian campaigns. "Charge" had Flynn and brigade saving the day and assuring victory at the Crimean War's battle of Balaklava, versus the criminal disaster the charge actually was. The second of Flynn's 12 pictures with Curtiz - a relationship of mutual loathing that would escalate into physical tussles - and of eight co-starring de Havilland, "Charge" would also be the first of a succession of historically-based adventure films that gaily shredded history. They demonstrated such on-screen spark - which manifested off-screen, but de Havilland has long intimated it never went beyond teasing and fervent flirtation - that WB codified the two, plus Curtiz, as a winning formula, to be reconstituted the next year in "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Flynn, nervous to start off with, clashed with director Michael Curtiz, even as he played practical jokes on his 19-year-old limpid-eyed love-interest Olivia de Havilland. ![]() Not long into his WB tenure, Robert Donat flaked on the lead in the upcoming sea adventure "Captain Blood," leading the studio, after exhausting all options, to go with its Aussie newcomer. He met Lili Damita, a tempestuous French actress eight years his senior, on the ship to the U.S and they commenced a torrid relationship, climaxing in a June 1935 marriage. This got the attention of Warner's stateside brass, which decided to import Flynn. He continued his prodigal hand-to-mouth meanderings, from China to India to France, then England, where he found some stage work, which led to the lead in a B-film by Warner Bros.' UK studio, "Murder at Monte Carlo" (1935). (He found no gold, but, by his sometimes fabulous recounting in his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways), this led to early intrigues - including life-threatening bouts with the law and cuckolded husbands - and a whirl of jobs, including diamond-smuggler, pearl-diver, reporter, bird-trapper, gigolo and charter-boat captain.Īs the latter, his chiseled looks caught the attention of an Australian movie producer, who cast him in "In the Wake of The Bounty" (1933) as famed mutineer Fletcher Christian (one of Christian's crewmembers was actually an ancestor of Flynn). He became sexually active early, fought at got expelled from school, ran into trouble when caught embezzling from a menial job and, just 17, bolted for New Guinea, then amid a latter-day gold rush. His marine biologist father, Theodore Flynn, taught at the local college, while Errol grew up distant from his mother, Mary Lily Flynn, who at one point branded him "a nasty little boy." She left the family not long after they moved to Sydney in 1920 and, while he maintained a good relationship with his father, his studies faltered as he began developing what would become his loveable-rake personality. ![]() ![]() He was born Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, on June 20, 1909. Swashbuckling star Errol Flynn reached the heights of showbiz success in action-adventure flicks such as "Captain Blood" (1936), "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938) and pseudo-historical films such as "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1936) and "They Died With Their Boots On" (1941). ![]()
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