DYLAN THOMAS had breakfasted on beer and by the time he swayed into the Wheatsheaf pub in Bloomsbury that bright spring lunchtime in 1936, he was quite drunk. To the regulars - a motley gang of writers, painters and struggling poets - it was a normal sight.

She was sitting on a high stool, gin in hand, her head tilted back with laughter. There was a merry, glinting light in her blue eyes and the power of her smile almost felled the smitten Dylan. He stood there, just staring, totally bereft of words - a stunning rarity for a man from whose mouth normally fell a waterfall of metaphor. Then he smiled, walked unsteadily over to her and just placed his head in her lap, announcing to all around: I am going to marry her.

She was Caitlin Macnamara, just 23, and she laughed while stroking the curly hair of the strange, clearly drunk man nestling his head comfortably on the cushion of her thighs. Maybe, I'll accept, she said, glancing down at him.

One thing was certain. Dylan Thomas, then increasingly regarded as the most brilliant poet of his generation, had made a devastating impact on the laughing Caitlin - and she on him. It was the beginning of a thunderclap relationship that was to last 17 years until his death, following a mammoth drinking session in New York.

Their love story is to be told in a new film, The Map Of Love (the title comes from a collection of Thomas's short stories), to be made by Mick Jagger's production company, Jagged Films. (The poet has long been one of the old rocker's favourite writers and he always takes a volume or two of his works when touring). This week, Jagged launched a nationwide search to find a young, unknown to play the coveted role of Thomas himself.

It is said that successful marriages are forged in heaven. For Dylan and Caitlin this was only partly true, for much of their partnership was also crafted in hell. Theirs was the epitome of the battling, tempestuous artistic relationship which seemed to thrive on argument, shouting, occasional violence - and a great deal of drink.

But there was also much mutual devotion, a considerable amount of angry sex and not infrequent excursions into other people's beds. They had a strange inter-dependence, even at times where they were furiously hurling insults - and often solid objects - at one another. Yet above all the shouting, the drunken rows and the constant announcements to friends that they were parting, theirs was a great love affair.

Of the two, Caitlin was by far the more temperamental. She possessed a fiery and unpredictable disposition that could suddenly flare up at what she perceived to be an implied insult. In later life, she could be outrageous, often needlessly angry and boiling with a temper that was fuelled by drink.

But Dylan could be forgiven for being stunned on his first sighting of Caitlin. She was, when young, stunningly pretty with corncoloured hair, blue eyes and high, Irish complexion. Caitlin was small - smaller than Dylan, who was himself short and sensitive about his height - but so neatly proportioned that she never gave the impression of being little.

Dylan particularly loved her hands - they were tiny with beautifully shaped, artistic fingers - and he likened them to small graceful fish, given to sudden and elegant movements.

She also dressed beautifully, if eccentrically by the standards of the day. When most other women were wearing tightly-fitting, almost masculine clothes with careful colours, Caitlin went for bright and brilliant dresses, colourful blouses and billowing skirts, or very loosely flowing dresses. (Her clothes had such a technicolour look that when Dylan took Caitlin home to meet his mother in Swansea, she later told a friend: The boy came home with a gypsy.) Nor did wartime austerity affect Caitlin's lively dress sense.

When women's clothing become tediously standardised, she simply brought dresses from theatrical costumiers.

SHE was, by instinct, a dancer - and was never happier than when twirling around free-style in the manner of the American Isadora Duncan. She even tried for work as a chorus girl in the London Palladium, but was soon sacked for being constantly late and extremely untidy. An attempt to join the Folies Bergere in Paris was blocked by her mother - although, typically, Caitlin managed to arrive in the French capital. Sadly, she found no work, but inevitably fell in love with the city's bohemian heart.

In London, she moved in artistic circles, drinking in Soho and Bloomsbury, taking various lovers and trying to make a living as a dancer. When she met Dylan that fateful spring day, she was the mistress of Augustus John, then the most famous portrait painter of the age.

And it was he, after Dylan had removed his head from Caitlin's lap, who formally introduced them. She had already heard about the wild Welshman and had been intrigued about the poet who, like Byron, was said to be mad, bad and dangerous to know.

She also sensed he was deeply vulnerable and sensitive - and it was obvious from his tattered appearance that he was also both impoverished and needy (although his stock was rising as a poet, he was not well-paid for his efforts and what little money he made mostly went on drink).

The attraction that day was mutual and intense. She offered no objections at all when, now somewhat sobered by her beauty, he suggested they leave the pub and slip away somewhere together. Augustus John was deep in conversation with someone else when they quietly edged their way out - and promptly made for the nearest hotel.

They booked a room - easier in artistic Bloomsbury in those stricter, more moral days - and once inside, fell upon each other with a rare lust.

Dylan would later boast that he had seduced her - from first meeting to actual bed - in 10 minutes flat. (But he was noted for his sense of exaggeration, once claiming to have quarrelled with Queen Mary in the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace about poetry. ) But they did spend five days in bed, making love, drinking and barely eating anything. When they were not in the hotel, they roamed around the area in a riot of boozing, going from pub to pub - and being thrown out of several in what was to become a familiar pattern for their married life to come.

At the hotel, they ran up a spectacularly high bill. This bothered neither of them because everything went on Augustus John's account - a fact which infuriated him when later presented with the bill. Not only was the painter furious that he had been landed with the cost of their five-day binge, he was also livid with Dylan for stealing his mistress. And when he next came face to face with the poet, he promptly punched him.

Soon, Dylan and Caitlin were living together and on July 11, 1937, they married - a surprising move for a highly bohemian couple who normally viewed such conventions as bourgeois. His friends concluded that he loved her so much and wanted her all for himself - and he was simple enough to believe that marriage would ensure this. He wrote to his friend Vernon Watkins: "My own news is very big and simple. I was married three days ago; to Caitlin Macnamara; in Penzance registry office; with no money, no prospect of money, no attendant friends or relatives, and in complete happiness.

We've been meaning to from the first day we met, and now we are free and glad."

IN MAY 1938, the couple moved to Laughame in Wales for what Caitlin later considered to be their only truly happy time together. During those early years of the marriage they were inseparable, despite being constantly short of money. Caitlin described their relationship as being twin souls during this time.

But by 1940 the war was beginning to becoming serious and Dylan faced the horrors of military service.

Although no coward, he had no patriotic zeal or political interests. So on the night before his army medical (and with Caitlin's co-operation) he drank so much that he arrived sweating, shaking, pale and covered in blotches. He was quickly made exempt from serving. But relations between the couple were starting to fray and while living in southern England in a colony of artists and writers, Caitlin was almost unfaithful to him. This led to violent and tearful fights. Things were never the same between them and Dylan could not get over the notion that Caitlin might have been unfaithful to him and that the trust between them was gone.

For the rest of their married lives - albeit with two children in tow - they drifted along, often spending months apart. They still loved each other, but went their own ways. When he died in New York on November 9, 1953, another woman was by his side.

A distraught Caitlin finally arrived, somewhat drunk, and howled with grief. She brought his body back to Wales, keeping a vigil by his coffin on the ship home. He was buried in his native soil on November 24.

For Caitlin, life was never to be the same again. She ended up in Italy, married film director Giuseppe Fazio, and had a son. But Dylan Thomas, the grand passion of her life, was gone and all she had left was his magical, richly-woven poetry - and the memory of the day he stumbled drunkenly into a pub and placed his head in her lap.

©Express Newspapers 2001