Skins star Kaya Scodelario has revealed that she wasn’t allowed to shave for three months while filming for her new movie, Wuthering Heights.

Kaya, who plays the lead role of Cathy in the new movie adaptation of the classic novel, was told she must let her body hair grow naturally so as to make her character look more authentic on-screen.

Speaking to The Sun, Kaya – who’s dating Shameless star Elliott Titensor – said that the order came from Andrea Arnold, who’s adapted the book for the film.

She said, “Andrea told all the girls at the beginning of the shoot, ‘Grow everything’. Everyone was, like, ‘Urgh’.

“I was really impressed with what I achieved in three months.

“We’d go to the pub in the evening and I’d hear people chanting, ‘Get your pits out’. I’d just sit and show them.” Read more & comment »

It’s not an easy task, I wouldn’t think, to adapt a novel as truly classic as Wuthering Heights and make its primarily internalised narrative available to viewers without us having to simply accept on faith much of the main protagonists’ motivations.

However, with major TV hits such as Occupation and Desperate Romantics under his increasingly successful belt, Peter Bowker could well have been voted Man Most Likely To Do It Well, and he didn’t disappoint with this adaptation for ITV.

Well, not entirely, although true Brontë connoisseurs may well argue that with Bowker’s reportedly – literally – taking a Stanley knife to the original book in order to arrange it into a coherent and hence more transferable-to-screen timeline, he butchered some of the original essence and culled some of the characters too. Read more & comment »