Errol Flynn

The Trial That Invented a Saying

In 1942, the world discovered that Hollywood's most desired man was sleeping with minors. That statutory rape trial ended in acquittal but gave popular language the expression In like Flynn. It referred to his knack for getting away scot-free from any sheets-and-skirts scrape.

And the industry didn't punish him.

Warner Bros. knew audiences wanted to see the rogue. Errol Flynn didn't play the adventurer; he already was one long before setting foot on a Los Angeles soundstage. He had prospected for gold in New Guinea and managed tobacco plantations while half the world was dying of boredom in gray city offices.

His rise to stardom came in 1935 with Captain Blood. It was a desperate gamble by the studio after Robert Donat turned down the lead role. Flynn could barely act at the time, but he handled a sword with a fury that frightened the most experienced fight choreographers.

Green tights and real duels

Michael Curtiz despised him. The Hungarian director couldn't stand his lateness or his total lack of respect for the film set's hierarchy. But the camera adored that angular face, which needed no makeup to shine under the nitrate spotlights of the era.

In 1938, he shot The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Technicolor did the rest. It was Warner's most expensive production up to that point, with a budget of two million dollars. Flynn insisted that the arrows be real in some shots so that the danger would show in the eyes of the extras running through Sherwood Forest.

His luck ran out all at once.

Alcohol began to take its toll in the mid-1940s. His features swelled, and the studio had to start lighting him with special filters to hide the dark circles from his nights of partying. He was no longer the athletic heartthrob who swung from the rigging in The Sea Hawk.

The decline of an exhausted body

In 1957 he took the role of a washed-up drunk in The Fugitive. It was his best performance in years because he was essentially playing himself in front of Henry King's camera. The director got the actor to forget his ego and show the vulnerability of a man who knew he was dying inside.

But there was still talent among the wreckage.

His last significant film appearance was in 1958 with Forever Ireland. The shoot in French Equatorial Africa was an inferno of heat and disease that finished off his health. While the rest of the crew fell ill from contaminated water, Flynn survived on vodka and pills.

He died in Vancouver in 1959 after a party where he drank huge amounts of gin. He was fifty, but the autopsy revealed that his body matched that of an 80-year-old man. Doctors found traces of malaria, chronic hepatitis and advanced cirrhosis that had turned his liver into a mass of fibrous tissue that was completely useless.