Sean Leslie Flynn was born on May 31, 1941 in Los Angeles, California. He was the son of Hollywood legend Errol Flynn and his first wife, French-American actress Lili Damita.
After graduating from a boarding school in New Jersey in 1960, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue acting. His only prior acting experience was when he was 15, when he appeared on his fathers tv show. In June of 1960, while visiting his mother in Fort Lauderdale, his good friend George Hamilton suggested Flynn shoot a scene for his new movie which was shooting in Fort Lauderdale at the time. He shot a few scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor.
In May 1961 he accepted a contract with Sage Western Pictures to star in the sequel to his father’s movie, Captain Blood. The film came out in 1964, titled “The Son of Captain Blood”. In September 1961 he began recording an album after signing a record deal with a low-status company. Two songs were released.
In 1962 George Hamilton announced plans to make a film titled “The Brothers”, starring himself, Sean Flynn and Terry Thomas, but it never came to be and was canceled. That same year Flynn became engaged to the daughter of John Payne and Anne Shirley, Julie Payne. They never went on to marry.
In 1963 and 1964 Flynn made a few European films but in 1964 he grew bored of acting and wanted to do something different. In 1964 he left to Africa to be a guide for safaris and big-game hunting. He also spent time as a game warden in Kenya. In 1965 he realized he spent much of his money so he went to Italy and made two Spaghetti Westerns for the money. They were filmed between Italy and Spain. In 1966, he went to Singapore to film his final film ever, a French-Italian action flick.
That same year (1966) Flynn began dabbling in Photojournalism. Flynn arrived in South Vietnam in January 1966 as a freelance photojournalist, first for the French magazine Paris Match, then for Time Life, and finally for United Press International (UPI). His photos went on to be published all over the world, and he became a big name in the high-risk photojournalism world (in 1966 he would even get wounded while trying to get photos). Throughout most of 1966 he stayed on battlefields to take photos, even being credited with saving an Australian platoon from decimation by a mine by identifying the mine while photographing the troops near Vũng Tàu.
In 1967, Flynn went to Jordan to cover the Arab–Israeli war of 1967. Flynn returned to Vietnam in 1968, after the Tet Offensive. He also worked as a cameraman for CBS News. Flynn went to Cambodia in early 1970 when news broke of North Vietnamese advances into that country.
On April 6, 1970, Flynn and a group of journalists left Phnom Penh to attend a government-sponsored press conference in Saigon. Flynn and Dana Stone decided to travel on motorcycles instead of limos, which is what the other journalists were using. There was a checkpoint in which 4 journalists had been captured. Flynn and Stone decided to go look into this and were never seen again. In 1984, 14 years after his disappearance, he was legally declared dead.