Emily Brontë was born on a day like today 199 years. Seldom is so much literary talent reunited in the same family, but her and her sisters Charlotte (Jane Eyre, Shirley) and Anne (Agnes Gray, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) they had left over for eternity. Emily's case is even more striking for having achieved that eternity with a single novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). Appropriate title for the summit that also eventually reached as epitome of victorian romance novel.
Signed under the pseudonym of Ellis bell and reviled by critics of the time, it was later recognized as a unique example of the deeper and more contained expression of the English romantic soul. Its setting in the dark Yorkshire moors and its main characters, the fickle Katherine earnshaw and the wild and passionate heathcliff neighborhoods, are the unforgettable. Today we take a tour of some of the faces who played them in the dozens of film and television adaptations that have been done.
My great sufferings in this world have been Heathcliff's sufferings, I have seen and felt each one from the beginning. The great thought of my life is him. If everything perished and he was saved, I would continue to exist, and if everything remained and he disappeared, the world would be completely strange to me, it would not seem to me that I am part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage of the woods: time will change it, I already know that winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal deep rocks, a source of little visible but necessary pleasure. Nelly, I am Heathcliff, he is always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure, as I am not a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So, don't talk about separation again, it's impossible ...
That is one of the best known paragraphs of this intense and terrible story of love, revenge, hatred and madness between Katherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. And the one that contains the essence which sums it up more exactly. A love that will last beyond death and his descendants.
However, its structure as a novel is complex and, at the time, it surprised critics and readers. Not easy to read And, as always, they will be the laziest or those who have not been able to pass beyond the first pages. So, we return once more to the more comfortable option: your various adaptations and versions in film and television. These are just a few.
Wuthering Heights (1939)
North American production directed by William Wyler, it was the first adaptation for the cinema. He had one of those casts that brought together the best of British performance at the time. Lawrence Olivier, Merle Oberon and David Niven composed Heathcliffs, Katherine and Edgar Linton with the most restrained tone of the time.
Wuthering Heights (1970)
British. It was directed by Robert Fuest and starred by then-newcomers Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall. It was nominated at the Golden Globes for Best OST.
Wuthering Heights (1992)
Also British. It is now 25 years since the premiere of this adaptation directed by Peter Kosminsky. It was starred by two actors in the best of their careers: the French Juliette Binoche and the English Ralph Fiennes. And the beautiful soundtrack, which is already worth watching, was signed by the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Wuthering Heights (1998)
British television movie directed by David Skynner. The protagonists are Orla Blady and Robert Cavanagh. Also there was a young Matthew Macfadyen as Hareton Earnshaw, another regular actor of period stories and later famous.
Wuthering Heights (2009)
Two-episode television miniseries directed by Coky Giedroyc and starring Charlotte Riley and a not-yet-known Tom Hardy, who were a couple in real life.
Wuthering Heights (2011)
It was directed by Andrea Arnold and starred Kaya Scodelario as Catherine and James Howson as Heathcliff.