Sexual evil

The Sunday Times has a profile on Ralph Fiennes and includes a couple of things from when he played Heathcliff.

During the filming of Wuthering Heights, Ralph Fiennes insisted on keeping a scene from the book in which Heathcliff bangs his head against a tree, pining for Cathy. He did it with such zeal that he drew blood.

Ouch! We hope it was a single take.

Although painfully shy in interviews, he was blessed with the icy good looks of a heartless bastard and played the part to the full in angst-ridden roles. Some thought his strong and angular profile, which drew screams at premieres, was diluted by the feminine red tint of his cheeks.

“I saw sexual evil,” the producer-director Steven Spielberg pronounced after watching Fiennes in Wuthering Heights. “There were moments of kindness that would move across his eyes and then instantly run cold.”

It was this performance that persuaded Spielberg to cast Fiennes as Amon Goeth, the sadistic concentration camp commandant in Schindler’s List.

Much as we like Johnny Depp, we find he won't be quite the same though. We keep getting this mental image of a Willy Wonka sort of Heathcliff... But who knows?

Categories: Wuthering_Heights, Movies-DVD-TV