after he threw a female stage manager down a stairwell. In 1934 Flynn was dismissed from Northampton Rep. He performed at the 1934 Malvern Festival and in Glasgow, and briefly in London's West End. Northampton is home to an art-house cinema that was named after him, the Errol Flynn Filmhouse, from 2013 to 2019.
He soon secured a job with the Northampton Repertory Company at the town's Royal Theatre (now part of Royal & Derngate), where he worked and received his training as a professional actor for seven months. In late 1933 he went to Britain to pursue a career in acting.įlynn got work as an extra in a film, I Adore You (1933), produced by Irving Asher for Warner Bros. The film was not a strong success at the box office, but Flynn's was the lead role, and his fate was decided. The most popular account is that he was discovered by cast member John Warwick. According to one, Chauvel saw his picture in an article about a yacht wreck involving Flynn. There are different stories about the way Flynn was cast.
Chauvel was looking for someone to play the role of Fletcher Christian. Early career In the Wake of the Bounty Īustralian filmmaker Charles Chauvel was making a film about the mutiny on the Bounty, In the Wake of the Bounty (1933), a combination of dramatic re-enactments of the mutiny and a documentary on present-day Pitcairn Island. In January 1931, Flynn became engaged to Naomi Campbell-Dibbs, the youngest daughter of Robert and Emily Hamlyn (Brown) Campbell-Dibbs of Temora and Bowral, New South Wales. He spent the next five years oscillating between New Guinea and Sydney. Īfter being dismissed from a job as a junior clerk with a Sydney shipping company for pilfering petty cash, he went to Papua New Guinea at the age of eighteen, seeking his fortune in tobacco planting and gold mining in the Morobe Goldfield. His formal education ended with his expulsion from Shore for theft, although he later claimed it was for a sexual encounter with the school's laundress. In 1926, he returned to Australia to attend Sydney Church of England Grammar School (known as "Shore"), where he was the classmate of a future Australian prime minister, John Gorton. Our cause gained no apparent advantage from his presence in my entourage we gained only third place in a field of seven." įrom 1923 to 1925, Flynn attended the South West London College, a private boarding school in Barnes, London. She further noted: "Unfortunately Errol at the age of nine did not yet possess that magic for extracting money from the public which so distinguished his career as an actor. In her memoirs, Lyons recalled Flynn as "a dashing figure-a handsome boy of nine with a fearless, somewhat haughty expression, already showing that sang-froid for which he was later to become famous throughout the civilized world". He made one of his first appearances as a performer in 1918, aged nine, when he served as a page boy to Enid Lyons in a queen carnival. He attended The Hutchins School, Hobart College, The Friends School and Albura Street Primary School and was expelled from each one.
įlynn received his early schooling in Hobart. Despite Flynn's claims, the evidence indicates that he was not descended from any of the Bounty mutineers. Both of his parents were Australian-born of Irish, English and Scottish descent. Flynn described his mother's family as "seafaring folk" and this appears to be where his lifelong interest in boats and the sea originated. His mother was born Lily Mary Young, but shortly after marrying Theodore at St John's Church of England, Birchgrove, Sydney, on 23 January 1909, she changed her first name to Marelle. His father, Theodore Thomson Flynn, was a lecturer (1909) and later professor (1911) of biology at the University of Tasmania.