Details You Didn't Know About Errol Flynn

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. He then continued to work in both The Land Down Under and Old Blighty, before winding up on a ship bound for the States in 1935, according to the British Film Institute.

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