Memorial unveiled to Hollywood superstar Richard Burton in home village

Richard Youle, local democracy reporter

The granddaughter of Richard Burton has unveiled a bench in memory of the actor outside the chapel where a packed service took place in 1984 after he died.

Charlotte Burton, accompanied by the stage and screen star’s niece Sian Owen, cut the ribbon outside Bethel Chapel – now a cafe – in Pontrhydyfen, where Burton was born and raised. The bench was the idea of community organisation Burton Bont Festival Group, which is organising a series of events to mark next year’s centenary of the actor’s birth.

Charlotte has lived her life in New York and Los Angeles but has visited Wales several times. She said when she was younger relatives took her and her brother on tours of South Wales’s valleys, recounting “sweet, funny, and sometimes tragic stories” childhood stories from the 1930s and 40s.

“My grandmother was deeply proud to be a South Welsh valleys’ girl,” Charlotte said of the late Welsh actress and theatre director, Sybil Williams – Burton’s first wife. “Her house in Long Island, New York, was covered with vintage postcards, travel advertisements and ornate tins representing her beloved homeland.”

She said last summer Miss Owen, her cousin, hosted her in Pontrhydyfen for two “remarkably sunny” weeks. “It was incredible to hear and see how grandpa’s impact felt so alive even after 40 years since his passing,” she said.

Humane

Although she never got to meet her grandfather Charlotte described being exposed to him through three lenses: his recorded work, his media presence, and Wales.

“To me the Welsh lens has always been the clearest and most humane,” she said. “Wales’s past and present community leaders and cinema fans are without a doubt the most central pillar in upholding his impact.”

Offering thanks to Pontrhydyfen, Port Talbot and Wales, she added: “Although grandpa Rich was known for his stints of extravagance he was ultimately a man of simple pleasures. Is there a better simple pleasure than a bench in the sun with a good view?”

Burton excelled on stage and in movies, starring in Look Back in Anger, Cleopatra, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, among others. Known to many for his relationship with film star Elizabeth Taylor, to whom he was married twice, Burton was married five times in total.

His surviving widow Sally Burton had been due to attend the bench unveiling on August 31 but was unable to be there.

Miss Owen, whose mother Hilda was Burton’s sister, described the bench as fabulous. “The simplicity of it is beautiful,” she said. Miss Owen grew up in Pontrhydyfen but left to study cardiology in London, later becoming an actress. She moved back to the Afan Valley village in 2000. “He was always Uncle Rich to me, not the famous mega-star,” said Miss Owen. “I remember as a little girl him sending presents to me from America.”

Speaking in 2022, she recalled trying her mother’s patience as a schoolgirl after she was caught playing truant. “Uncle Rich told her to send me up to London so he could have a chat with me,” she said. “My punishment was going up to London to stay at the Dorchester with Uncle Rich and Elizabeth.”

Burton Bont Festival Group began with friends in Pontrhydyfen talking about the village, its past and what anniversaries they could mark.

Heritage

Chairwoman Andrea Edwards said a sense emerged that the village “was losing some its heritage and stories”. The group held fundraising events and gained funding from a local wind farm project and a UK Government grant via Neath Port Talbot Council. A Burton mural has been added to the side of The Miners Arms pub, where the actor’s father used to drink and his parents met and married.

Events marking Burton’s birth centenary will include festival and heritage weekends and a gala concert. A bench has also been installed by a children’s play area commemorating Pontrhydyfen actor and singer Ivor Emmanuel, who played Private Owen in the 1964 film, Zulu.

The bench commemorating Burton outside Bethel Chapel is inscribed with, ‘To begin at the beginning’, the opening words of Swansea playwright Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, to which Burton brought his unmistakable tones in a recording.

Born Richard Walter Jenkins in 1925, Burton died aged 58 in 1984 in Switzerland, where he was buried. Hundreds of people attended the memorial service at Bethel Chapel, which former steelworker Peter Bowen and his wife Jackie have recently turned into a cafe and events space.