With a screenplay co-authored by Aldous Huxley, a Bernard Herrmann score and an uncredited Elizabeth Taylor in support – the most famous movie version recreated the Yorkshire moors on a Hollywood sound stage. We are unlikely to have seen the last of these lovers just yet.Įyres and graces: the finest on-screen pairings After all, Jane Eyre has already inspired three musicals to date, not to mention two operas, two ballets and an orchestral symphony. Just as long as Cliff Richard, having made a musical out of Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff, doesn't turn his attention to another Brontë-sister Gothic hero. One day Wasikowska and Fassbender's post-feminist Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester will seem as dated as Welles and Fontaine's pre-feminist versions, but that is surely the attraction to successive generations of artists, delighted to revisit these archetypal lovers afresh. Toby Stephens seemed merely miscast in the most recent TV version, from 2006. Dalton had the dark Byronic looks, Hinds the masterful mien, Hurt seemed wistful, haunted and miscast. The most recent cinema version was Franco Zeffirelli's 1996 film starring Charlotte Gainsbourg as the adult Jane (Anna Paquin, Sookie in HBO's True Blood, played the younger version) and William Hurt as Rochester.

Since then, TV has revisited Jane Eyre every 10 years or so: in 1973 with Sorcha Cusack and Michael Jayston in 1983, starring a pre-007 Timothy Dalton and Zelah Clark and in 1997, with Samantha Morton and Ciará* Hinds. British TV next serialised Jane Eyre in 1963, with the character actor Richard Leech – an intimidating presence, he played Mr Murdstone in the BBC's 1966 version of David Copperfield – in the role. There were five American versions in the early Fifties (including one with Charlton Heston as Rochester) before the first British serialisation, in 1956, with Stanley Baker – then typecast as the boorish heavy – as Rochester.

The real rush of Jane Eyre adaptations had to wait for the television age, Brontë's story being well-suited to the expansiveness of a TV series. This Jane Eyre might have been better off remaining silent: the tinny dialogue comes across more like a drawing-room comedy than a Gothic romance. The first sound version was filmed in 1934, starring Colin Clive, in supremely dodgy sideburns, and Virginia Bruce, whose expressive, kohl-rimmed eyes were made for the silent era. There were seven silent films made of Brontë's 1849 novel, including Orphan of Lowood. But back to the un-zombified screen renditions of Jane Eyre.

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