Tower Colliery story set to hit big screen

by David James, South Wales Echo

HOLLYWOOD star Nick Nolte has been tipped to play miners’ hero Tyrone O’Sullivan in a big-screen adaptation of the Tower Colliery story.

A movie script telling the story of how 239 Welsh miners scraped together £8,000 apiece to keep open a mine that British Coal had declared worthless, has been developed by Channel Four Films.

The British film company, which made hit comedy Brassed Off with Ewan McGregor about a Yorkshire colliery band struggling on despite the pain of pit closures, has bought the rights to the project.

Tower Colliery’s chairman Tyrone O’Sullivan, the NUM lodge leader who led the workers’ extraordinary buyout, said he had to intervene to cut back some sex scenes.

The happily-married grandad-of-three, 62, said the original script had seen him conducting a torrid affair with a predatory accountant negotiating the sale of the pit.

He said: “The only mistress in my life has been the colliery.

“So the movie people agreed to my suggestion – this fancy lady tries to seduce me but I turn her down.

“Not that that really happened either.”

Hollywood star Nick Nolte, who has starred in more than 40 films including Hotel Rwanda and Down and Out In Beverley Hills, has been rumoured to be in the frame to play Tyrone in the film.

Tower, Wales’ last deep coal mine, shut its doors last week after 13 years of producing coal under its miner owners.

Its story has already been immortalised in an opera by Welsh composer Alan Hoddinott and by Tyrone himself in book about the buyout called Tower of Strength.

The closure was covered by newspapers across the world with the Financial Times describing Tower’s story as “an extraordinary example of potential change in an area that has become one of the most deprived in the UK, perhaps Europe”.

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