Edith Piaf, Picasso, Dylan and me

By Nick Parry
BBC Wales News website

Eluned Phillips will celebrate her 93rd birthday later this month

Born on the same day in 1914 just 50 miles apart, writers Eluned Phillips and Dylan Thomas had much in common.

Both redheads from Wales, they moved in the same Bohemian circles during the 1930s and shared a love of writing and poetry from an early age.

Ms Phillips, 93 later this month, has outlived her contemporary by over 50 years and now publishes her memoirs.

She said she never really got on with Thomas. "Either he was too drunk to talk or in a world of his own."

"I was an ignorant girl from the country really and Dylan was a bit of a scrounger," she adds.

"I like most of his work - it's just I did not like his way of life."

The pair met through their mutual friend the artist Augustus John, a man she had far more time for.

When she sang I had never heard anything like it - it paralysed me Eluned on her friend Edith Piaf

"Augustus was so generous - but he had an ego and could get out of hand."

Ms Phillips was born and raised in Cenarth, on the border between Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, and still lives there today.

After years of cajoling by family and friends, she has finally sat down at her home computer and penned her memoirs - The Reluctant Redhead.

"I never did want red hair, it was a burden from beginning to end," she said.

Once, aged just four, she tried to dye it black by dipping her head in a cask of tar and had not it not been for a family friend it may well have cost her life.

"They had to shave me - I was like Yul Brynner - I was quite happy but they told me when it grows back it will be redder still."

Eluned Phillips met some of the 20th Century's most infuential arts figures

It is the colour of her hair that she blames for her free-spirited and impulsive character, which in her early 20s first took her to London and then Paris.

In London she quickly fell in with a crowd that included Thomas, John and another poet, Dewi Emrys.

Then she started making regular trips to Paris and it was there she met and became good friends with the legendary singer Edith Piaf.

"When she sang I had never heard anything like it - it paralysed me.

"We talked a lot - she was wonderful, really a very nice person.

"She was a very capable person - quite religious - it was a marvellous time.

In 1983 she became the only woman to win the crown twice

"Someone I had great fun with was Maurice Chevalier - that was an odd thing because I trod all over him.

"I was at Piaf's house and I walked across this piece of carpet to get some music and he was sleeping underneath.

"He had a wonderful sense of humour...I was very lucky to be in amongst those people."

Another anecdote she enjoys to tell is the time she travelled to Spain to meet Pablo Picasso.

She told Piaf of her desire to meet the artist and the singer set the meeting up.

"He had a sense of humour. He took me into his studio, made coffee and we spent an afternoon going through his pictures. He really was a kind person," she said.

One of his paintings however - The Ugly Woman - left her less than impressed.

"I told him I did not like it but he had the cheek to tell me that is how I would look when I was old."

Ms Phillips first became a household name with Welsh-speaking families 40 years ago when she won the crown at the National Eisteddfod, becoming only the second woman to win the competition.

Then in 1983 she repeated the achievement and remains the only woman to do so.

After a week of engagements in Wales to promote her book she flies to America - to visit the many friends she has there with Welsh connections.

"I never thought this little book would create such a fuss," she added.