1939's Wuthering Heights digressions

In our last post we talked about 1939's Wuthering Heights version and, in one of these strange internet coincidences, we just came across this article published in The Bozeman Daily Chronicle about a local forgotten celebrity (now living in Livingston, Montana):

Nearly seven decades have passed since Hazel Warp put on a Scarlett O'Hara costume and tumbled down the stairs of Tara in the epic film "Gone With the Wind." But that Hollywood stunt marked a high point in Warp's life. (...)
Warp was the stunt double for actress Vivien Leigh, who played the narcissistic Southern belle in the 1939 Civil War movie. (...)
Her performance was good enough to get her a callback for Leigh's next movie, "Wuthering Heights."
"With 'Wuthering Heights,' (Leigh) told them that she wanted me or she wouldn't work," Warp recalled in an interview at Evergreen Healthcare, where she now lives. (Karin Ronnow)

As we know the final Cathy in William Wyler's film wasn't Vivien Leigh but Merle Oberon. The story is widely known but in this web you can read a brief digest:

When William Wyler, who was going to direct "Wuthering Heights" for Goldwyn, went to London to offer Olivier the part of Heathcliff, the actor at first refused. He didn't want to go back to Hollywood. Then he said he might do it if Vivien could play Cathy; but Merle Oberon had already been cast. Partly as a bribe, but partly because he had gone to a preview of Vivien's latest film, "Sidewalks of London", and had been impressed by her, Wyler offered her the role of Isabella Linton. Vivien turned it down, wanting Cathy or nothing. "For a first part in Hollywood, you'll get nothing better than this", the director warned her, but she refused to heed him, and Isabella went to Geraldine Fitzgerald.

The relations between Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon were far from cordial. This is a brief extract from Terry Coleman's Olivier biography that we mentioned in our previous post:

They had filmed together before, and amicably, in The Divorce of Lady X but in Wuthering Heights, in the close-ups, she accused him of spitting at her. "Daggers drawn... We spat at each other," he said, "we hated each other, and after one appalling row in which we were both trembling and tears were streaming down, and we we were absolutely trembling with rage. Willy (William Wyler) said 'Roll them,' and it was the most heavy-making love scene we'd done and we did it hating each other, but it was one of the top love scenes in the film as it turned out. That was Willy, very bright, very clever."

Categories: In_the_News, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering_Heights