Burton's dictionary is given to his old school.

Byline: Robin Turner Reporter robin.turner@walesonline.co.uk

ADICTIONARY which film star Richard Burton used to learn French in his later years has been donated to his old school in Port Talbot by his widow.

Burton wrote his name into the Harrap's New Shorter French and English Dictionary and dated it 1977, which was seven years before his death in Celigny, Switzerland.

And some of the revision notes the actor wrote down and placed in the dictionary may give a hint as to the health problems Burton started to experience in the years leading up to his death from a brain haemorrhage on August 5, 1984, in Celigny, where he is buried.

The French words he wrote down alongside their English translations included maussade (gloomy), torticolis (stiff neck) and le retraite (retirement).

Burton was a heavy smoker from the age of just eight, and by his own admission in a December 1977 interview with Sir Ludovic Kennedy, as well as being a heavy drinker, was smoking 60 to 100 cigarettes a day.

According to his younger brother, as stated in Graham Jenkins' 1988 book Richard Burton: My Brother, he smoked at least 100 cigarettes a day.

Professor Hywel Francis, of Swansea University, the former MP for Aberavon, has presented Port Talbot's Dyffryn School librarian, Jayne Simonson, with the French dictionary and notes as part of the university's Festival of Humanities, and also to mark 90 years since Burton's birth in Pontrhydyfen, Port Talbot.

Widow Sally Burton, now living in Australia, said the donation was "my contribution to Richard's old school".

Dyffryn Lower School, near the centre of Port Talbot, was formerly the steel town's secondary school and Burton won a scholarship to go there.

One of the teachers at the school was P H Burton, a miner's son from Mountain Ash, who had a degree in mathematics and history, but whose true passion was drama, and he kept his pupils at the "Sec" enthralled during English lessons, where Shakespeare predominated.

He was to become Burton's mentor, and the young Richard Jenkins later adopted Burton's name for his acting work.

French would have been useful for Burton as early as 1957, when the actor and his first wife, Sybil, moved to become tax exiles in Celigny, Switzerland, where his Swiss villa was called Le Pays de Galles (Wales, in French).

Ever afterwards Burton could only spend 90 days a year in the UK, which meant despite his dreaming of playing King Lear, he could never again rehearse and appear for a season on the London stage. When Burton got the dictionary he was with a new woman. In 1976 he divorced Elizabeth Taylor for the second time and married Susan Hunt, former wife of racing driver James Hunt. They were divorced in 1982, and later that year he met Sally Hay.

However, the marriage did not last and they were divorced in 1982.

CAPTION(S):

<BThe French dictionary Richard Burton used and signed, right, while living in Switzerland

<BRichard Burton moved to Switzerland for tax reasons