![]() Certainly, we can scoff when Zela’s Jane keeps saying that she is in her late teens (when the actress was ten years older) or when Rochester says that he is twenty years older than Jane, or when it is pointed out that he is ugly – the two characters appear to be the same age, and nobody in fairness could say that the future James Bond was lacking in the looks department. Some have found fault in key aspects of both of these characters in the 1983 adaptation, saying that Zelah Clarke is too old to play Jane, and that Timothy Dalton is too handsome to play Rochester. Two characters above all others dominate ‘Jane Eyre’ in both book and dramatised form we are, of course, talking of Jane herself and Rochester, so these have to be correct. I’m very much in favour of this, as after all a screenwriter would have to be superb at their craft to be able to write as well as Charlotte did – although it has to be pointed out that the screenwriter on this occasion, Alexander Baron, was a master of his craft! ![]() The second thing a modern viewer can’t help but notice is that many of the sets look ‘stagey’ in a way that we wouldn’t expect today, so that it has an air of a theatrical production rather than relying on special effects or big budget location shots.Īnother thing that grabs the viewer from the off is how faithful the script is to the words that Charlotte Brontë herself set down on the page, with the dialogue lifted almost entirely from the original novel. The first thing that caught the attention was the theme music, slow, melodic, plaintive and beautiful it perfectly prepares us for the drama ahead. Robert James is a particularly chilling Mr. I’m a huge fan of the BBC’s 2006 version of ‘Jane Eyre’ starring Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens (who has fine form as a Brontë actor, as he also played Gilbert with aplomb in an earlier ‘ The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall‘), so when I first sat down to watch 1983’s offering, it had a lot to live up to. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology we can now watch many different versions of Charlotte Brontë’s brilliant tale and I’d been given this particular version as a well selected Christmas present. I’ve reported previously on Emily Brontë’s possible visit to Shibden, the once home of Anne Lister, and of the many Brontë connections to the beautiful town of Halifax, but I was pleased to see that one of Shibden Hall’s very knowledgeable guides is also a guide at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth now there’s a woman who goes the extra mile to support Yorkshire’s cultural and literary heritage!įor reasons of time, today’s post may be a little shorter than usual but I’ve decided to dedicate it to a review of a series that I’ve just finished watching: ‘Jane Eyre’, produced by the BBC in 1983. ![]() Suffice to say they did this excellent series proud, and Shibden Hall was filled with fans from across the world. This weekend I visited Halifax to see their Gentleman Jack weekend celebrations.
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