Under Milk Wood
A film by Andrew Sinclair
“an outstanding achievement in all departments” – Variety
A
Timon Films
Production
For further information please contact:
Reel Solutions
Bill Lawrence / Tony Earnshaw
/
Tel: 01422 255 630 / www.undermilkwoodfilm.com
UNDER MILK WOOD WILL BE TOURING THE UK
DURING 2013 and 2014
www.reelsolutions.co.uk
Running time: 88 mins Cert: 12A
Under Milk Wood
Synopsis
Legendary cinema icons Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole star in the screen adaptation of Dylan Thomas’ classic play.
A celebration of religion, sex and death, Under Milk Wood follows the people and events in a small Welsh harbour village over the course of one night.
The film is notable for being the only film to combine the stellar talents of Burton, Taylor and O’Toole. It was shot primarily on location in Wales and has since acquired a reputation among aficionados as a cult movie.
Under Milk Wood was selected in 1971 to open the Venice Film Festival. In a crusade against elitism no Golden Lion was awarded that year. The president of the Festival, Réné Clair, told Andrew Sinclair “I wish I had made your film.” “M’sieu,” replied Sinclair, “I could not have made it without watching all your films.”
“The film, beautifully photographed and spoken, casts the brooding spell of Thomas’ verse in its reconstruction of the seaside village and the daily round of its inhabitants. – The Intl. Herald-Tribune
Under Milk Wood
A film by Andrew Sinclair
Cast List
1st Man RICHARD BURTON
Rosie Probert ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Captain Cat PETER O’TOOLE
Myfanwy Price GLYNIS JOHNS
Mrs. Pugh VIVIEN MERCHANT
Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard SIÂN PHILLIPS
Mog Edwards VICTOR SPINETTI
2nd Man RYAN DAVIES
Gossamer Beynon ANGHARAD REES
Nogood Boyo DAVID JASON
Mr. Waldo RAY SMITH
Sinbad Sailors MICHAEL FORREST
Polly Garter ANN BEACH
Mr. Cherry Owen GLYNN EDWARDS
Mrs. Cherry Owen BRIDGET TURNER
Mr. Pugh TALFRYN THOMAS
Mr. Willy Nilly TIM WYLTON
Mrs. Willy Nilly BRONWEN WILLIAMS
Lily Smalls MEG WYNN OWEN
Butcher Beynon HUBERT REES
Mrs. Beynon MARY JONES
The Rev Eli Jenkins AUBREY RICHARDS
Evans the Death MARK JONES
Mr. Ogmore DILLWYN OWEN
Mr. Pritchard RICHARD DAVIES
Lord Cut Glass DAVYDD HAVARD
Utah Watkins DAVID DAVIES
Mrs. Utah Watkins MAUDIE EDWARDS
Ocky Milkman GRIFFITH DAVIES
Bessie Bighead PEGGY ANN CLIFFORD
Dai Bread DUDLEY JONES
Norma Jane PAT KAVANAGH
Mrs. Dai Bread One DOROTHEA PHILLIPS
Mrs. Dai Bread Two RUTH MADOC
PC Attila Rees DAVYD HARRIES
Mary Ann Sailors RACHEL THOMAS
Waldo Wife One ANDREE GAYDON
Second Woman and Waldo Wife Two EIRA GRIFFITHS
First Neighbour & Waldo Wife Three MARGARET COURTENAY
First Woman & Waldo Wife Four RHODA LEWIS
Waldo Wife Five PAMELA MILES
Jack Black JOHN REES
Mrs. Rose Cottage JILL BRITTON
Mae Rose Cottage SUSAN PENHALIGON
Inspector EDMOND THOMAS
Organ Morgan RICHARD PARRY
Mrs. Organ Morgan DILYS PRICE
Gwennie OLWEN REES
Mother IRIS JONES
1st Fisherman GORDON STYLES
2nd Fisherman BRIAN OSBOURNE
1st Drowned Sailor SHANE SHELTON
2nd Drowned Sailor PAUL GRIST
3rd Drowned Sailor BRYN JONES
4th Drowned Sailor JOHN RAINER
5th Drowned Sailor BRYN WILLIAMS
Villager in Sailor’s Arms ALDWYN FRANCIS
Villager in Sailor’s Arms IFOR OWEN
Villager in Sailor’s Arms DUDLEY OWEN
Woman Villager in Sailor’s Arms GLADYS WYKEHAM-EDWARDS
Gomer Owen IEUAN RHYS WILLIAMS
Old Man T.H. EVANS
Second Neighbour GWYNETH OWEN
Third Neighbour LUCY GRIFFITHS
Fourth Neighbour ANGELA BRINKWORTH
Technical Credits
Producer TIMON FILMS
Co-Producers: JULES BUCK
HUGH FRENCH
Director ANDREW SINCLAIR
Screenwriter ANDREW SINCLAIR
Associate Producer JOHN COMFORT
Location Manager LEE BOLAN
Assistant Director DOMINIC FULFORD
Continuity ANN SKINNER
Casting Director MIRIAM BRICKMAN
Director of Photography BOB HUKE
Camera Operator DENNIS LEWISTON
Sound Mixer CYRIL COLLICK
Art Director GEOFFREY TOZER
Music by BRIAN GASCOIGNE
Construction Manager FRED GUNNING
Editor WILLY KEMPLEN
Wardrobe Mistress DULCIE MIDWINTER
Wardrobe Master ROY PONTING
Chief Make-Up Artist ERIC ALLWRIGHT
Peter O’Toole’s Make-Up CHARLES PARKER
Hairdresser JOAN WHITE
Property Master MICK LENNON
Property Mistress JACQUEMINE CHARROTT-LODWIDGE
Elizabeth Taylor, a Welsh Cleopatra in ‘Under Milk Wood’
A reminiscence by writer/director Andrew Sinclair
In 1972, Dylan Thomas’s 1954 radio drama, Under Milk Wood, a “play for voices” about the inner lives of Llareggub, a fictional Welsh village, was adapted for film. It starred Elizabeth Taylor; her husband Richard Burton, who had been in the original radio play; and Peter O’Toole. The director was Andrew Sinclair.
Andrew Sinclair: From my reputation, Elizabeth Taylor disliked me on sight. She felt undereducated, her husband had wanted to become a don, and I had been an academic.
In her Shepperton studio dressing room, while making her previous film Zee & Co, she appeared somewhat disheveled, if that were possible. She gave me three orders before starting Under Milk Wood. Firstly, her back was too bad to take the train to Wales; I would have to film her two-day shoot in London. Secondly, it had to be at the end of the schedule, as her movie was a long way from a wrap. And although she was playing the small part (for Dylan Thomas) of a Welsh whore called Rosie Probert, she would require three Parisian nightdresses, at the cost of £600 – half our costume budget.
The next time I met her was the coup de grace. Richard Burton had invited me and the comic Ryan Davies, who played the Second Voice, for a drunken evening in his Camden house. After a few bottles, Richard decided we were his two best friends, and he presented each of us with a silver goblet, given by the Rotary clubs of Wales in grateful recognition of their favourite son and daughter, Elizabeth and Richard Burton, alias Jenkins. “I have to cut all the jewellery advertisements out of the glossy magazines,” Richard was confiding in us, “or I would be ruined. She loves the rocks.”
But he was unable to forestall the apparition that burst through the door – Elizabeth, in a yellow hot-pants wool suit, covered by a wild mink coat, the tails of the little beasts twirling on the floor. “Taraah!” she cried – and then she saw the silverware Ryan and I were holding. “What are you doing with my goblet?” Elizabeth screeched. I handed one silver cup back to Richard, Ryan handed him the other, and we left hotfoot into the London night. Behind us, a voice like a police siren rent the black air.
At Lee Studios, we waited all morning for Elizabeth to appear. We had only two days to shoot her, for if she and Richard did not leave British shores by tomorrow midnight, their back taxes would have settled much of the national debt. I went to her dressing room, and I put down a costly gold Egyptian serpent bracelet as a peace offering from my pocket. Unfortunately, she was making herself up as Cleopatra, all kohl and rouge and peacock eyelids. “That won’t do,” I heard myself daring to say. “You’re a Welsh sailor’s whore of the ‘fifties. You can’t look like that.”
“I always look like Cleopatra,” she said, and dismissed me.
She did not come on set until noon. I decided to turn her into Captain Cat’s wet dream, as in the text. “Grease the lens,” I told my cameraman, Bob Huke, who asked, “Do I make her beautiful, or like the back end of a bus?”
I swallowed and gulped out, “Beautiful, please. She has picture approval.”
We laid her on the brass bed and bunged in three shots on the most incredible violet eyes before lunch. I noticed that Bob was performing in front of the Brute lights, as the conductor of an orchestra, only his baton was a black ruler. When she was gone, I asked Bob what he was doing. “Hiding her three chins,” he said, “even when she moves. The thingy throws a shadow across her neck. We call it a Charliebar. Any Charlie can use it.” And indeed, for the full-length solo stills, because of her low-slung figure, Elizabeth insisted on being shot upwards by a photographer lying on the floor. On such a take from a worm’s eye view, she looked far taller and slimmer, and a bouffant hairdo made her head a decent size.
After Peter O’Toole had saved the picture by getting Elizabeth back on the bed after lunch, I made my only personal appearance and comment. I was the pair of black gloves putting two pennies on the defunct Rosie Probert’s eyes. I had solved the problem of having five different cemeteries in various locations, all pretending to be one at Llagerrub, by travelling with a moveable gravestone as a cornerpiece in the shot; it bore the Probert name. I must say, Elizabeth left without saying goodbye, although she did write in Burton’s screenplay, which he gave to me, that it had been a fantastic experience. Indeed, for both of us.
At lunch with Tony Curtis and Roddy McDowall some time later, I complained about Elizabeth’s behavior, only to be sharply reproved by McDowall, a lifelong friend of Elizabeth’s; the two had starred in the 1943 film Lassie Come Home, when she was only 11. She was no Shirley Temple, but she was, he said, one of the few child actresses, after her breakthrough performance in National Velvet, who had grown and matured. The two were often working on films at the same time. By Californian state law, minors had to receive four hours of tuition daily between takes. Roddy came out of a lesson one day to meet Elizabeth, running into class.
“You’re late!” he cried.
“Wouldn’t you be,” she asked, “if you had just had Robert Taylor sticking his tongue down your throat?”
“You must forgive her,” Roddy told me at the end of his story. “She has lost all sense of reality. But child star to real star. That is a wonderful and rare thing to do.”
It was a wonderful and rare thing to do, as he well knew. Taylor is now gone and I regret her passing. She truly leaves a void in extravagance and human nature. © Andrew Sinclair
About the Cast
RICHARD BURTON (1st Man)
Richard Burton’s long and distinguished stage and film career was highlighted by several outstanding performances and seven Oscar nominations for My Cousin Rachel, The Robe, Becket, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Anne of the Thousand Days and Equus, all for Best Actor. In the theatre his work in the plays of William Shakespeare – among them Hamlet, Henry V, The Tempest, King John and Coriolanus – made him one of the world’s premier interpreters of the Bard’s words.
Born in Pontrhydyfen, South Wales, one of 13 children of a miner, he began his acting career there on radio before being cast by playwright Emlyn Williams in his production of The Druid’s Rest. He made his film debut, also for Williams, in 1949 in The Last Days of Dolwyn.
Burton went to Hollywood in 1952 to star opposite Olivia De Havilland in My Cousin Rachel and his performance as Philip Ashley was rewarded with an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. Throughout the 1950s he alternated between film and theatre in epic movies such as The Robe and Alexander the Great, and two seasons at the Old Vic playing the lead in Henry V, Hamlet and Coriolanus.
In 1954 he took the role of First Voice in the BBC radio adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, produced by Douglas Cleverdon.
Burton’s film credits include The Desert Rats; Look Back in Anger, for Tony Richardson; The Longest Day; Cleopatra; John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana; Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew; The Comedians; Boom! Where Eagles Dare; Staircase; Anne of the Thousand Days; Villain; Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky; Equus, for Sidney Lumet; The Wild Geese; The Medusa Touch; Absolution; Tony Palmer’s nine-hour biopic Wagner and his final film, 1984, for Michael Radford.
Burton’s recording of The Little Prince won the Grammy Award for Best Children’s Album of 1975. Burton also received a gold disc for his recording of Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds.
The Burton Diaries were published in 2012. On March 1 2013 – St David’s Day – a star in Burton’s name was unveiled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR (Rosie Probert)
Elizabeth Taylor twice won the Academy Award for her performances in BUtterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was also nominated for Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer. Among her other films were National Velvet (her personal favourite), Little Women, Father of the Bride, Ivanhoe, Giant and Cleopatra.
Ms. Taylor was honoured in 1993 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presented her with the prestigious Jean Hersholt Award, in recognition of her outstanding humanitarian work. In the 1980s she became a leading spokesperson and fundraiser on behalf of AIDS.
On stage she was Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and Amanda Prynne in Noel Coward’s Private Lives opposite Richard Burton.
Taylor’s other film credits include A Place in the Sun; The Girl Who Had Everything; William Dieterle’s Elephant Walk; Beau Brummell; The Last Time I Saw Paris; Reflections in a Golden Eye for John Huston; Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony; The Only Game in Town; X, Y and Zee; and The VIPs; The Sandpiper; Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew; Nevill Coghill’s Doctor Faustus; Peter Glenville’s The Comedians; Joseph Losey’s Boom! Peter Ustinov’s Hammersmith is Out and Waris Hussein’s Divorce His; Divorce Hers, all with Richard Burton.