Caitlin MacNamara

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Caitlin MacNamara (December 8, 1913 - July 31, 1994) was the wife of Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas.

She was born in Hammersmith, London, to Francis and Yvonne MacNamara. At 16, she moved to London and entered a dancing school. She eventually settled in Ireland, in County Clare, then Paris.

Caitlin met Dylan Thomas in a bar in London in 1936, and the pair were married on 11 July 1937 in Penzance, Cornwall. Caitlin had three children with Dylan Thomas and one with Giuseppe Fazio whom she met in 1957 after moving to Italy (Dylan Thomas having died in 1953, aged 39).

In Caitlin, her autobiographical account of her marriage with Thomas, she claims to have lost her virginity due to being raped by the painter Augustus John, who thereafter made her into one of his mistresses. She also states that her initial attraction to Dylan Thomas was as a means of getting away from Augustus John; moreover she claimed that Thomas was not physically attractive to her, particularly as he became obese and his drinking habit worsened; and finally, she says that by the time of his death their marriage was in deep trouble.

She blamed Thomas' sudden death on medical malpractice. Some support for this theory is to be found in the article "Dylan Thomas: Death of a Poet"[1] on the BBC website.

By her own account, after the death of Dylan Thomas she experienced severe emotional and psychological distress, even being institutionalized at one point. She began to attend Alcoholics Anonymous in 1973, aged 60, and died aged 80.

As of November 2006, two films[2] about Caitlin were in production, one, starring Lindsay Lohan, had the working title The Best Time of Our Lives; the other, Caitlin (with Miranda Richardson as Caitlin), was being produced by Pierce Brosnan, who also has a small part in it as Dylan Thomas' literary agent.

A third film about Caitlin was "The Map of Love", with Emily Watson as Caitlin, but production was abandoned in 2004. One of its backers was Mick Jagger

Caitlin was also the author of "Leftover Life to Kill".