This piece builds on a more direct review of Emerald Fennell’s 2026 “Wuthering Heights”, published on Crikey.com.au
Ideally, for a text so conclusively haunted — full of ghosts and changelings — the first ever film adaptation of Wuthering Height, made in 1920, is lost. The poster, though, promises to show us “Emily Brontë’s tremendous Story of Hate”, which indicates it was more faithful to the novel than any that follows.
A contemporary review notes the difficulty for cinema to adapt “the rough gloom at Wuthering Heights, where there is neither hero nor heroine, moral nor mirth …” This “heavier demand” is one every subsequent adaption has shirked.
For example, every adaptation I’ve seen – 1939, 1959, 1970, 1992 and now 2026 – features a variation on the same scenewhere young Heathcliff and Cathy talk, and form their tender, loving bond. There is no such scene in the book.
In the William Wyler directed version from 1939, which was nominated for eight oscars and sets the predominant template for versions to follow, this is achieved by transplanting dialogue. In the book, our narrator, the long serving maid Nelly Dean, consoles Heathcliff at one point by insisting he’s handsome enough he could be the combined progeny of royalty from China and India. This line is given to Cathy.
There’s a mirroring here: the foundling Heathcliff is of ambiguous heritage, but is fairly explicitly not white, and he has been played almost exclusively by white men — Laurence Olivier, hewn of rock, a wild-eyed Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, 24 and not yet grown into the looks that would have him cast as Bond, with an odd hawkish beauty.
Merle Oberon, who plays Cathy, and had been born in India to a white father and South Asian mother, was subject to a similar erasure. She could not have starred in Wuthering Heights in the first place had she not hidden her heritage; to enter America, at the time, banned migration from all Asian countries). She invented a new origin and picked Tasmania, Australia’s most Gothic locale, for her new birthplace. Her true heritage wasn’t made public until after she died. She had never visited the place she claimed to be from.
One of the most striking scenes in Wyler’s film is a party scene, not in the book, where Isabella Linton announces to Heathcliff “Madame Ehlers is going to play the harpsichord”.
The story comes to a complete stop — save for Heathcliff and Cathy’s charged looks at one another — to accommodate an appropriately driving and feverish performance of Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca”. It’s performed by Alice Ehlers a Jewish Austrian harpsichordist. She was born in 1887, a mere 40 years after the first publication of Wuthering Heights. She would live until the 1980s.
As far as I know, only 2011’s version in casting James Howson as Heathcliff, breaks the tradition. A non-actor who was chosen as part of a nation wide search, he was paid £7,800, his voice on the film was dubbed and the last mention of him I could find was the 2012 court reporting that a conditional discharge for the racially aggravated harassment of his partner and mother of their young daughter. His lawyers say the aftermath of the film brought about a psychotic break.
Dancing to Architecture 