He’s an illiterate, violent bully, often cruel to women, children and animals, and he spends much of his life wallowing in anguish. And this weekend a new generation of girls will fall in love with him.

Heathcliff, the brooding anti-hero of Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights, is about to emerge from the shadows on to our television screens in a new adaptation of the classic novel.

The ITV drama, starring Tom Hardy, Charlotte Riley, Andrew Lincoln and Sarah Lancashire, filmed at East Riddlesden Hall, near Keighley, and Oakwell Hall, in Birstall, is said to offer a cool, edgy interpretation of the tragic love story. Screenwriter Peter Bowker has focused on events after Cathy’s death.

Wuthering Heights has inspired everything from pop songs, to musicals, to ballet. The first film was a silent movie shot in Haworth in 1920. Other big-screen versions include a 1954 Mexican translation, a 1988 Japanese version and a 1992 film with singer Sinead O’Connor making an appearance as Emily Bronte! Even Charlton Heston has played Heathcliff, in a 1950 American TV series.

The film regarded as a classic is the 1939 melodrama starring an Oscar-winning Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff.

More than 150 years after Emily Bronte wrote the book, it seems we still can’t get enough of lovestruck Heathcliff, Cathy and the bleak Haworth moors. After this weekend’s two-part series goes out, there’ll no doubt be a surge of visitors to the Bronte Parsonage Museum, where an exhibition of costumes from the TV drama – including dresses worn by Charlotte Riley as Cathy and a dramatic long black coat worn by Tom Hardy as Heathcliff – is going on display until the end of the year.

Why, in an age of reality TV and romantic comedy, are film-makers continually drawn to Wuthering Heights?

Ann Dinsdale, collections manager at the Bronte Parsonage, says the novel is universal and timeless.

“It fits into different settings and has been translated into at least 26 different languages,” she says. “It’s a fascinating book, a huge life-changing novel. It’s part of popular culture, inspiring countless interpretations.”

Ann says the romantic appeal of Heathcliff is largely down to films, and she hopes the new TV drama will present a more rounded version.

“He’s one of the darkest characters in literature, he’s brutal, violent, cruel, vindictive,” she says. “But there’s a romantic ideal of him, based on films. I hated the 1939 film. It’s largely responsible for the romantic gloss cast over the novel. “A lot of films tend to end with Cathy’s death, but it’s only when you cover the whole story that you get a rounded view of Heathcliff. In later years he’s abusive, broken and middle-aged. He’s not an attractive, brooding young man anymore.”

Screenwriter Peter Bowker says: “The most successful version remains the Laurence Olivier film which succeeded because, with classic Hollywood ruthlessness, they filleted out the Cathy/Heathcliff story and ditched the rest of the plot. It does the novel a disservice. “It is many things as well as a love story. It’s about hate, class, revenge, sibling rivalry, loss, grief, family, violence, land and money. These multiple themes are part of the reason why this book has proved stubbornly unadaptable.

“Three hours of television presents us with the opportunity to open up other themes, not least the story of how damage is passed down through generations, how revenge poisons the innocent and guilty, how the destructive nature of hate threatens to overwhelm the redemptive power of love.”

Peter will visit the Bronte Parsonage Museum in October to talk about the process of adapting a classic novel for television.

And next month Leeds-born best-selling novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford will be at the Old Schoolroom, Haworth, talking about her love of the Brontes with arts critic and journalist Danuta Kean.