Word: pontrhydyfen
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...been touched by the finger of God, Actor Hume Cronyn observed, and there was in fact something miraculous in his becoming an actor at all. His father, Richard Jenkins, was a coal miner in the Welsh steel town of Pontrhydyfen; Burton was the twelfth of 13 children, and his mother died when he was two. An ambition to be not only an actor but a superb actor was somehow ignited, and when he was in his teens he attached himself to Philip Burton, who taught literature and drama in a local school. "He had a very coarse, rough voice then...
...Elizabeth (the order of Commander of the British Empire) and Wife Elizabeth (a Rolls-Royce saloon). He also ruminated on retirement: "When I really want to slope off and simply be garrulous in my old age, I shall go back to the South Wales village I came fromPontrhydyfen. Elizabeth will still be superbly dressed, but the double chin she has had from childhood will become a third chin, and she'll be asking me to get her a vodka and tomato juice at 10:30at night, I hasten to add instead...
Burton obligingly called up his family in Pontrhydyfen and told them to look after his journalist friend, and in hospitable Welsh fashion they did. Burton had told him how "boys proved their manhood" in Pontrhydyfen by walking across a bridge on an inverted V railing over a 120-ft. gorge...
...from phone to phone. The exercise was repeated a thousand times to teach the boy coordination and mathematical precision in speaking. Today, Richard understandably hates telephones; but he speaks with fantastic precision. Also, Phil Burton would take Richard to the summit of Mynydd Margam, the last high mountain between Pontrhydyfen and the sea, and have him loft arias from Shakespeare into the wind. As Phil Burton moved farther and farther away from the spot on which Richard stood...
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