Gentleman Adventurer / Real Life

• The late Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, Prince of the Netherlands, was part this and part Lovable Rogue. Though the "Gentleman" part is disputed.
• BRIAN BLESSED: When he isn't shouting in films or shouting on the television, he's trying to climb up Mount Everest. He's also boxed with a GODDAMN Polar Bear. He won.
• In an interview on CSPAN's Q and A, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat described William F. Buckley Jr. as one of these after describing his experience of skinny-dipping with the (at that point, very old) Buckley after he (and other young National Review interns) had eaten a fancy meal on his boat.
• Sir Richard Francis Burton was the first European to view Lake Tanganyika, the first to visit the Great Mosque of Mecca (at a time when non-Muslims were forbidden on pain of death), and served as a British diplomat in numerous places. He was also a Gentleman and a Scholar, knew several languages, and wrote the English translations of A Thousand And One Nights and the Kama Sutra, as well as studies on such varied topics as geography, ethnography, human sexuality, and fencing.
• James Cameron: for a given definition of "Gentleman," at least. Ever since Titanic (1997), he's taken on deep-sea exploration and photography as his hobby.
• Joseph Conrad. Sailed the seas and didn't even learn English until age 20 and changed the face of English literature. He was even literally referred to as a "gentleman adventurer" by William McFee in a forward to Conrad Argosy.
• Charles Darwin, who Jumped at the Call. And promptly was seasick for the rest of the next few years. When he got back to England, he never left again, and busied himself with experiments in his garden and documenting the sex lives of barnacles, among other things.
• Sean Flynn, son of movie actor Errol Flynn, took photos of The Vietnam War for TIME Magazine, Going for the Big Scoop. He disappeared (and was apparently killed) while traveling by motorcycle in Cambodia some time around 1970. Flynn wasn't in Vietnam because he needed the money, and, according to Michael Herr in "Dispatches," none of the press corp respected him until they actually saw the photos he was taking. He occasionally left Vietnam to star in motion pictures, then returned to get shot at some more.
• Before he got into politics, Barry Goldwater was one of the first people to boat recreationally through the Grand Canyon (he rowed himself all the way to Lake Mead) flew relief missions in over 165 different kinds of aircraft all over the world (including over Mt. Everest) in World War II and The Korean War, gave free flights home for returning veterans of both wars, pressured the Pentagon to support desegregation and the creation of an Air Force Academy, and still flew B-52s as a two-star general in the Air Force Reserve while a sitting Senator.
• George Gordon, Lord Byron: Poet, aristocrat, Trope Namer for the Byronic Hero, and by virtue of this trope... a national hero in a country that absolutely had nothing to do with his own. Living proof that not every gentleman can be an adventurer: Byron actually had none of the training necessary to be even mildly effective as a soldier or military commander, and his romanticized idea of heroic warfare was met with the far harsher realities: he died of septicemia without ever taking the field. One could argue that his celebrity status led to Acquired Situational Narcissism, and he thought he would be great at warfare by virtue of being great at everything else, but things ended differently than they did in his poems.
• Sir Edmund Hillary.
• George Mallory, who probably summed up this trope with his reply to the question of why he wanted to summit Mount Everest:
  "Because it's there."
• Alexander von Humboldt was an early example. A Prussian aristocrat, he traveled to South America and explored from 1799-1804. He traveled up the Amazon headwaters, documented a huge selection of plants and animals from the region, discovered and corrected errors in the maps and sea charts of Ecuador's coast, and even was one of the first people to propose that South America and Africa were once connected. His exploits were recorded and published in the United States at the time, and his resulting celebrity led to numerous mountains, rivers, towns, and Humboldt County, California, being named in his honor.
• Truth in Television: Theodore Roosevelt was a well-educated, well-dressed, well-mannered statesman who also just so happened to have spent much of his life as a cowboy, an army colonel, a police commissioner, a Great White Hunter, and an all-around Memetic Badass who led the US army to an unlikely victory in the Spanish-American War, survived a bullet to the chest, and killed a cougar with a knife. His other hobbies included boxing, wrestling, polo, tennis, hiking, and football.
• The Grand Tour was the 18th to early 19th Century equivalent of a gap year for the upper class, and it was more or less about a Gentleman (or woman) going Adventuring for some time before settling down.
• Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
• Ernest Hemingway was one of Western literature's most prominent Memetic Badasses. First 20th Century writer to get away with the word "fuck". Master of Beige Prose. Fought in World War I, covered the sequel. Wrestled lions. Flew airplanes. Caught big fish. Made Mojitos and Daiquiris manly. Grandfather of actresses Mariel Hemingway and Margaux Hemingway. Shot himself because even the FBI was scared of him, and he got sick of them lurking around every corner wherever he went.
• Peter Kemp was a Brit who, like George Orwell, Jumped at the Call at the start of the Spanish Civil War and enlisted (but on the opposite side from Orwell) and wrote the biography Mine Were Of Trouble about his experiences. He was able to turn his adventures into an entire trilogy, as despite barely surviving he enlisted in World War II immediately after. He spent the rest of his life as an Intrepid Reporter, covering revolutions across the world.
• "Mad Jack" Churchill, a British Army officer who served in WWII and fought with a longbow, bagpipes, and a Scottish broadsword. His exploits earned him the Military Cross and Distinguished Service Order, and he was captured by the Germans after getting knocked out by explosives, who then sent him to a concentration camp believing him to be a relative of Winston Churchill. He and four other officers including Major Johnnie Dodge managed to dig an escape tunnel, but were recaptured before being rescued after the Tyrol conflict. He was then sent to the Burma Campaign, but by the time he reached India, America had ended the war which displeased him. In 2014, the Royal Norwegian Explorers Club published his biography and named him one of the greatest examples of this trope of all time.
• A modern example is "Lord" Miles Routledge, a British independent Intrepid Reporter who travels to dangerous locations as a hobby while offering as much aid as he can to residents. He vacationed at Chernobyl in 2019, achieved international fame after going to the capital of Afghanistan the day before it was retaken by the Taliban in 2021, accepted an invitation to wartorn South Sudan from a local fan soon after, covered the 2022 Kazakhstan riots, and went on a relief mission to Ukraine during the 2022 Russian invasion.