Taffia How the Tinseltown took by storm
From Richard Burton to Catherine Zeta-Jones ...
THE ACTORS’ CRUCIBLE: PORT TALBOT AND THE MAKING OF BURTON, HOPKINS, SHEEN AND ALL THE OTHERS by Angela V. John (Parthian £20)
HEAVEnS above! or words to that effect, exclaimed Frank Sinatra, when he saw Richard Burton, Stanley Baker, Hugh Griffith and Rachel Roberts, the crazy wife of Rex Harrison, bearing down on him in Hollywood, waving half-empty bottles. ‘It’s the Taffia!’
We are indeed a tough, close-knit and histrionic lot in the principality, with a love of colourful display and cunning artistry that makes the average flowery Sicilian mobster seem like a big girl’s blouse by comparison.
Venture across the Severn Bridge and you can hardly move for world-class opera singers (Sir Geraint Evans, Dame Margaret Price, Bryn Terfel), poets (Dylan and R.S. Thomas), painters (Gwen and Augustus John), but chiefly we abound with actors — the greatest and most glamorous of whom remains Richard Burton, whose voice was so sonorous and beautiful ‘you felt something shift in the air around you’, as Angela John says in this stimulating book.
Burton was born as Richard Jenkins in Pontrhydyfen, north of Port Talbot, in 1925. His mother died of septicaemia when he was two, so he was taken in by his elder sister, Cis, whose husband, Elfed, was related to the Hopkins clan — and Anthony Hopkins was born locally in 1937, the son of a baker in Tanygroes Street.
The big question is how did this plethora of theatrical genius happen? Michael Sheen, born in 1969, was also raised in Port Talbot, near ‘the largest petrochemical works in Europe’.
ROB BRYDOn, too, hails from the neighbourhood. He went to the Welsh College Of Music And Drama, which benefits from The Anthony Hopkins Charitable Foundation. Posters, photographs, and Hopkins’ Zorro sword have been handed over to raise money. Brydon went to the same primary school as Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Other famous faces include Rhys Ifans, Matthew Rhys and Ioan Gruffudd. ‘Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd was a good oboist in his youth,’ we are told. Fancy.
Go back a few decades and there was Ray Milland, who came from neath, Ivor Emmanuel, who was in Zulu, and Kenneth Griffith, a stalwart of Boulting Brothers comedies.
We ought not to forget Victor Spinetti, who told me that the first time he was kissed on the lips was in the scrum when he was playing rugby with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Television interviewer Mavis nicholson and largerthan-life personality Molly Parkin fit into the picture somewhere. As do I, of course.
I think we can disregard the theory, outlined by John, that the South Welsh are good at projecting their voices ‘due to generations of miners having worked in conditions of foul air underground . . . The lack of oxygen meant that they had acquired a habit of breathing deeply into their lungs.’
My mother has never been down a mine in her life. Yet if she shouted in Caerphilly they heard her in Bristol.
nor do I wish to hand over the laurels to the chapels, with their bombastic preachers and biblical recitations.
no — drama is (or was) big in South Wales because of the opportunities on offer from the brilliant schools and dedicated teachers, well-stocked public libraries, the operatic societies and flourishing amateur drama groups.
Even in my corner of the Rhymney Valley, people were always putting on Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, rehearsing Sheridan and Wilde and decorating carnival floats.
Plus everyone went to the pictures. Angela John tells us that art deco cinemas abounded in Port Talbot, where reports of forthcoming attractions took up more space in the local papers when Burton was a boy than did accounts of Hitler.
Burton left school early to toil as a drapery assistant in the Taibach Co-Operative Central Stores.
His teachers, however, having recognised his unique gifts, were appalled.
Strings were pulled and he was re-instated at the secondary school as a scholarship
pupil. He made his way eventually to Oxford and, his talent having been spotted by playwright Emlyn Williams, to his debut on the West End stage.
The teenage Richard took the surname of his teacher, Philip Burton, who became his legal guardian when Richie, as he was known, lodged with him in Connaught Street in the spring of 1943.
If Burton became ‘a superb storyteller intoxicated by the richness of the English language’, it is because Philip Burton taught him how to quote poetry and Shakespeare by the yard.
There were other mentors, too, in fairness. He enthusiastically attended the Youth Centre, where the warden and staff ‘channelled my discontent and made me want to be an actor’.
The process was repeated with Anthony Hopkins, a moody, only child who’d ‘entertained himself by playing Beethoven on the piano’. On stage, said Hopkins, ‘I suddenly felt at home for the first time in my life’. Through acting he built up his confidence and he ‘threw himself into rehearsals’, until he could steal a show with one line.
As a classical actor, the new luminary is Michael Sheen, who through his school became a star with the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre Company. ‘The ethos was one that instilled strict discipline and absolute dedication but in a nurturing and creative educational context.’
At 16, Sheen joined the National Youth Theatre Of Wales, and ‘lanky, elfin, volatile, electric and fearless’, he won a Laurence Olivier bursary to study at Rada.
Overlaps abound in this chronicle. Rob Brydon went to drama college in 1984, ‘the year that Richard Burton died’. Sheen unveiled a blue plaque outside Burton’s house in Hampstead and was the guest of honour when Burton’s gold star was revealed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Burton himself used to fly fleetingly back to Wales in a private jet.
He and Elizabeth Taylor presented a silver cup to the South Wales Miners’ Choir in Porthcawl, and they contemplated appearing in Cinderella at the end-of-the-pier. (‘Impossible of course,’ sighed tax-exile Burton in his diary.)
AS JOHN says, he became a prisoner of his fame, ‘unable to return to where he had come from but never fully fitting in anywhere else’. Hopkins was to share the role of the psychiatrist, Dysart, with him, in Equus, on Broadway. But Burton never appeared on a British stage after the brief run of Doctor Faustus at Oxford in 1966. Angela John does well to link these ‘fiery, mercurial and unpredictable’ actors with the physical landscape that produced them, the sparks and sulphur of the pits and factories. Port Talbot, she says, is ‘the gritty industrial town you can’t ignore’. Today everything is in decline. The fate of the steelworks, the sheds for which are three-and-a-half miles in length, hangs in the balance. The coal industry has gone, and the scarred valleys are now ‘renowned for mountain bike trails’. There is an annual 10km ‘Richard Burton Fun Run’ starting from Cwmavon Community Centre, sponsored by Tata Steel — though I can’t imagine Burton running far unless there was a pub at the end of the route. At Blanco’s Hotel in Port Talbot there is a Michael Sheen Suite. The tragedy, however, is that owing to cutbacks the Taibach Library is operated by volunteers. The local authority has decimated teaching provision for drama. Cinemas are closed and boarded up. As everywhere else, funding is stopped, grants cancelled — there is no appreciation or understanding of the fact that a commitment to arts education is vital to the health and wellbeing of a community. Angela John’s book made me feel quite militant about all this, as well as instilling great pride in my heritage.