Famous people of West Wales

This page has long linked Angharad Rees to Llanelli in Carmarthenshire. Careful research finds no support for that specific claim: she was born in Edgware, Middlesex, though her family moved to Cardiff when she was an infant and she grew up there — genuinely Welsh in upbringing even if not by birthplace.

By 1910, Virginia Woolf was writing that the era of John Singer Sargent was over and "the age of Augustus John was dawning." He superseded Sargent as Britain's most fashionable portrait painter, capturing the likenesses of Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, T.E. Lawrence, James Joyce and Guilhermina Suggia — portraits renowned for their psychological penetration and occasional cruelty. Lord Leverhulme was so upset by his portrait that he cut out his own head and locked it in a vault.

From around 1910 he made regular painting expeditions into north Wales with his friend James Dickson Innes, working in the Arenig valley in Snowdonia and producing some of the finest landscape work of his career. This period was later the subject of a BBC documentary, The Mountain That Had to Be Painted (2011).

During the First World War he was attached to the Canadian forces as an official war artist, producing memorable portraits of infantrymen. He was the only officer in the British Army, apart from the King, permitted to wear a beard. He was made a Royal Academician in 1928, awarded the Order of Merit by George VI in 1942, and given the Freedom of the Town of Tenby in 1959.

His later career was marked by a decline that even his granddaughter Rebecca John acknowledged frankly in 2024 — too many society portraits, too much drink. But the early work, particularly the drawings and the pre-war oils, remains extraordinary. He wrote two volumes of autobiography: Chiaroscuro (1952) and Finishing Touches (1964, posthumously). He died at Fordingbridge, Hampshire on 31 October 1961, aged 83. His papers are held at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

A poor working man with little formal education, Frost spent years developing his flying machine, which used reversible horizontal fans to gain height before spreading wings tilted by a lever. His patent, number 1894-20431, was registered in London on the 25th of October, 1894. The exact circumstances and success of his reported 1896 flight remain historically disputed, but he is remembered as one of Wales' earliest aviation pioneers.

Dale's 354-episode run as Big Mac made him one of the longest-serving cast members in Casualty's history, spanning close to a decade and a half on screen. Tenby remains proud of its connection to the actor, with residents recalling him working in his father's record shop long before he found fame.

Bale's parents divorced in 1991, and at seventeen he moved to Los Angeles with his father and sister. He has since become one of Hollywood's most respected leading men, working with directors including Christopher Nolan, David O. Russell and Adam McKay.

Merrison was a member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company in the 1970s and later worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, building the stage credentials that underpinned his celebrated radio and screen career.

Connie continues to work in musical theatre and broadcasting and remains a well-known figure in Pembrokeshire, where she was raised.

White Ladder spent 151 weeks on the UK Albums Chart, eventually reaching number one two and a half years after its original release. It became the fifth best-selling album of the 2000s in the UK and was ranked the tenth best-selling album of the 21st century in the UK in 2019. The follow-up, A New Day at Midnight (2002), went straight to number one, famously beating Pop Idol runner-up Gareth Gates to the top spot and selling 150,000 copies in its first week.

Gray has continued to record prolifically — Life in Slow Motion (2005), Draw the Line (2009), Foundling (2010), Mutineers (2014), Gold in a Brass Age (2019), Skellig (2021), Dear Life (2025) and Nightjar (2026) — a body of work that has consistently rewarded listeners who value craftsmanship and emotional depth over trend-chasing. He has received four Brit Award nominations, including two for Best British Male. He is the brother-in-law of Phil Hartnoll of Orbital, with whom he collaborated on the 2001 single Illuminate.

He married his wife Olivia in Los Angeles in 1993 and has two daughters, Ivy and Florence — the latter a musician who has appeared on his recent recordings. He lives in Hampstead, London. The Sloop Inn in Porthgain, Pembrokeshire, remains, by his own reckoning, the best pub in the world.

If you'd like to visit the family shop, Window on Wales they're on Main Street in Solva and Nun Street, St Davids, Haverfodwest 

At the age of 103, Eleanor Daniels recalled her theatre days in an interview for the American Welsh magazine Ninnau: "I was an actress," she said. "I started acting when I could talk... when I placed my two feet on the stage, everything became fine. Only the stage was real."

In 2000, S4C broadcast the first television documentary on Hughes's life, made by Nant Films with his biographer Stephen Lyons; in 2008 a further film, In Search of Gareth Hughes, was produced by his relative Kelvin Guy.