[1] Lynen was born on 24 May 1920 in Nermier and spent the first years of his life in his native Jura, where his parents raised animals.
Being from an artistic family (his father painted and his mother was a singer and pianist), he was noticed at age 12 by filmmaker Julien Duvivier while he was studying at the École du Spectacle.
At age 18, he played Alphonse Daudet's Le Petit Chose for Maurice Cloche, then La vie est magnifique with the same filmmaker.
After several months in prison, and two escape attempts, he was sentenced to death by a military tribunal and executed, with 14 other Resistance members, on 1 April 1944 in Karlsruhe, at the age of 23.
When his body, which had been buried in a common grave, was repatriated to France in 1947, it was reburied in the military section of the Gentilly cemetery.