‘An impossible passion’: cinema’s long love affair with Wuthering Heights

When Andrea Arnold imagined the opening shots of her film of Wuthering Heights, she saw heavy mists ­swirling around the outline of a misshapen creature as it scaled a hillside. The figure would slowly be revealed as a climbing man, his back laden with dead rabbits for skinning.

On the day of the shoot, however, it was bright and sunny – and there were only three rabbits. “People keep saying one day I will come to like it,” she said later of her 2011 screen version. “It was a difficult experience making it, for various reasons. I find it hard to look at it.”

Arnold is not alone in feeling outwitted by Emily Brontë’s stirring 1847 novel. Wuthering Heights does that to directors. It is a gothic story that roams so wildly in the minds of readers that putting it out into the real world can seem diminishing, or even crass. It is not just the ferocity of the storytelling required, or the tricky handling of supernatural forces, but the central relationship itself. For modern film-makers, the question has become whether this violent narrative is now too dark to deal with, and whether its bullying romantic lead, Heathcliff, is too hot to handle.

Nevertheless the director, actor and writer Emerald Fennell, fresh from for her popular success with Saltburn, announced last week that she is to invent her own brooding Heathcliff and headstrong Catherine Earnshaw for the big screen.

Already Fennell – familiar to audiences for playing the young Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown – is in trouble with some fans of the book. The Brontë chatrooms lit up when she revealed that she had cast the dashing Jacob Elordi, Saltburn’s ill-fated young buck, in the part of Heathcliff, and the Australian actor Margot Robbie as Catherine.

Many complained that Robbie, who has lately stalked the globe as Barbie, is not right to play the raven-haired teenager of the book and that Elordi is too conventionally good-looking for Heathcliff. Some were also angry that he is not the right ethnicity to play a character described in the book as “a dark-skinned Gypsy” who looks like a “lascar” (a slang term for a south Asian sailor), “or an American or Spanish castaway”.

“Did anyone actually read the book before deciding this?” queried the Independent’s film critic on hearing the news.

A decade ago, Arnold dodged these accusations of “white-washing” by casting the first non-white actor, James Howson, in the role. In contrast, screenwriter Peter Bowker, who wrote his TV film of the book in 2009, felt the term “Gypsy” was more likely a 19th-century stereotype for an outsider, rather than being meant as a literal characteristic. “There was certainly a growing fear of the ‘other’ in Victorian England and a number of urban myths about ‘cuckoos in the nest’ – strays or orphans that were brought into the family who then consumed it,” he said.

The Brontë expert Sharon Wright is actively enjoying the new fuss. “I think it is brilliant that people are still talking about this book – and with as much intensity as they were 200 yeas ago. Reviewers back then attacked its ‘brutal cruelty and unnatural love’ and looked down on its ‘vulgar depravity’. Poor Emily never saw a good review.”

Wright’s own new book, The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar, about the buildings described in the novels written by Emily and her two literary sisters Charlotte and Anne, comes out next year and was written together with Ann Dinsdale, who works at the trust now run from the three sisters’ former parsonage home in Haworth.

The characters in Wuthering Heights, Wright believes, will always be much harder to represent on film than the houses Brontë described or the wind-blown Yorkshire landscape: “Heathcliff really is a creation that lives only in the reader’s mind’s eye. Brontë is deliberately ambiguous about him.”

But Heathcliff is unlikely to be Fennell’s only problem. She will also need to decide how much of the rain-lashed saga to tell. Several earlier screen versions cut off the story before it gets too self-reflective. But, as Bowker admitted after his version was released, no matter how bravely you take a scythe to the lengthy text, there are certain key lines that a film-maker ought not to sidestep. “At first I thought this is going to be such an easy gig, because the language is so wonderful,” he told fans of the novel. “But then I started writing it out and realised very little of it works as dialogue because it is so heightened and poetic. So I wanted to preserve some of that quality, and there are classic lines, such as Cathy’s ‘I am Heathcliff’, which really you cannot lose.” Only Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 version, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, gets credit from Brontë enthusiasts for telling the whole unruly tale.

The tragedy of Wuthering Heights, for those still wondering what Kate Bush has been singing about all this time, revolves around the bootless love between Catherine and her Heathcliff, an adopted orphan boy found starving on the streets of Liverpool. The destructive relationship between these two, who find no way to express or fulfil their yearnings, is its gloomy core. For Bowker the point of the story was this “impossible passion”. “I don’t know my Freud well enough to speculate,” he said, “but there is something very fixed and unchanging about their passion which is both entrancing and terrifying.”

Perhaps the most glamorous portrayal of these central lovers is a black-and-white 1939 screen version. A tousle-haired young Laurence Olivier plays the wayward Heathcliff and the striking Hollywood pin-up Merle Oberon is Cathy. While it does have its longueurs, this film is probably the reason that a string of other film-makers have repeatedly hoped to rise to the challenge. It created a turbulent visual template that is hard to forget, even for those who do not know the book.

The other screen outing on the wild and windy moor that remains popular with audiences today is one that starred a pre-007 Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff and Anna Calder-Marshall as Cathy. Made in 1970, it was a box-office success and still has ardent admirers, although it also stops halfway through the original plot and leaves out two pivotal scenes: first, the devastating moment when Heathcliff overhears Cathy dismissing him, and then her later ghostly manifestation at his window.

An uncomplicated pleasure of Brontë’s enduring love story is the clever character names she chose. “Heathcliff” is so evocative, as is the name of the home that gives the book its title. And the three Brontë sisters had reason to understand the importance of a name. Not only is Charlotte’s plain Jane Eyre the perfect foil to her roistering Mr Rochester, but the authors themselves had to invent male names for themselves to avoid embarrassing their family and to pass muster in the wider world of publishing. So Charlotte temporarily became Currer Bell, Anne was Acton Bell and Emily, Ellis Bell.

Wright is also someone who recognises the value of using the right name. Last week she celebrated the success of her campaign to get the spelling of the Brontës’ surname corrected in Westminster Abbey, where a wall plaque in Poets’ Corner commemorates the three writers’ lives. Their surnames had been carved in stone without the two dots over the “e”, known as a diaeresis, that denote the emphasis they placed on the final vowel.

Contemplating the amended memorial this weekend, Wright is sure of one thing: “I do think Emily would be absolutely delighted that we are still trying to figure out Heathcliff. We all have our own vision in our heads and I am really looking forward to seeing Emerald Fennell’s.”