Glyndwr wrote in: Just seen JRD’s interview on S4C’s entertainment show, “Popcorn”. Talking to the interviewer in the Welsh Black Mountains, JRD looked very relaxed considering his recent accident. Apart from doing a passable impersonation of Gollum (“S4C lovesss us, my precious; no they don’t, they hatesss us!”), and talking once again about the hours spent having Gimli’s prosthetics attached painfully to his face, he said how he had been persuaded by his son to take the role of Gimli in the trilogy after initially being unsure whether it would be a success. As soon as he began work on the project, however, he knew that it would be massive.
“Living in Salisbury,” he said, “my mum and dad found that I was getting mocked by the other kids, and they decided they would only talk to me in English… I don’t speak Welsh any more, but the music of Wales is in my head.”
Today’s Welsh Daily Mirror also reported how JRD’s big ambition was to play rugby in the red shirt of Wales, as his father had been a forward for Pontypool and had a Welsh trial in 1934. “In those days,” he said, “miners would come out of the pit, have a bath, run down to the pitch and then hammer each other.”
Perhaps today’s Welsh team ought to take a leaf out of that book: they might actually win some matches!
