Sally Burton (née Hay), also known as Sally Hay Burton (Braintree, Essex, 21 January 1948), is an author and theatre producer and was the fourth and last wife of the actor Richard Burton.
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The daughter of a journalist, Jack Hay, Sally worked as a freelance production assistant on the set of the TV mini-series Wagner when Richard Burton met her.[1] During a seven-month tour of the United States with Noël Coward's play Private Lives, in which Elizabeth Taylor was Richard Burton's co-star, Burton and Hay married on 3 July 1983 in Las Vegas; it was Burton's fifth marriage and her first. After the tour, they went to rest in Hawaii for several months before returning to their home in Céligny where Burton died on 5 August 1984; Sally Burton was then 36.[2]
Sally Burton donated the Richard Burton Collection to Swansea University in 2005[3] and she received an honorary fellowship from that university in 2006.[4]
In 2005, Burton moved to Perth, Western Australia, where her brother and his family had lived for years.[5] In 2009, she launched the Richard Burton Award for New Plays, offering a prize pool of A$30,000 for writers of unproduced scripts; this is Australia's richest prize for playwrights.[5] The 2010 first prize of A$20,000 was awarded to Caleb Lewis; Hellie Turner was awarded the runner-up prize of A$10,000.[6] Burton is patron of the Black Swan State Theatre Company, which will give the winner a public reading.
Burton is also a patron of the West Australian Ballet and a supporter of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra; she is a board member of Agelink, a theatre company for older actors. Each year, Burton presents the Sally Burton Awards, a prize pool of A$4,000, to the two most talented performers of Shakespeare texts at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.[7]
In 2009 she launched the independent production house Onward Production to create more acting jobs.[8] In October that year she produced the Australian première of the international touring anthology Seven Deadly Sins Four Deadly Sinners at the Playhouse Theatre in Perth[9] and is currently presenting Noël Coward's Private Lives at Perth's Subiaco Arts Centre.
She is also the Executive Producer of the British documentary series Great West End Theatres.[10]