As many news outlets have published, the musician and composer Sinéad O'Connor (1966-2023) died yesterday of undisclosed causes. The media and the public are remembering her for the power of her voice, the mythical Prince version of Nothing Compares 2 U, her involvement in many causes, and her (too) many controversies and mental health struggles...
We, at BrontëBlog, want to remember her for her brief role as Emily Brontë, in Wuthering Heights 1992. She opened and closed the film surrounded by the evocative music of the also recently disappeared Ryuchi Sakamoto. Some haunting moments that we count among the best of the Peter Kosminky's adaptation.
/Film also joins us in celebrating this cameo:
Conspicuously absent from the credits is the film's most intriguing cameo, the bit of stunt casting that, in hindsight, remains the most potent site of untapped potential: Sinéad O'Connor as Emily Brontë herself. (...)O'Connor was actually shy underneath all of the fire and fury, which made her the perfect person to play Emily Brontë. In contrast with the withdrawn, strenuously obedient Charlotte and laconic, straightforward Anne, Emily comes across on the page as wild, ungovernable, subject only to the whims of her fierce passions. Yet she too had a poet's heart, and with it came a taciturn temperament, a natural and often unruly shyness."Wuthering Heights" opens on the wild and windy moors. A lone, penitent figure in a hooded robe walks toward a stone cottage overtaken by moss and vines. O'Connor begins the opening narration in voiceover, and once inside the hallowed habitation, unveils her angular, angelic face. She appears for no more than five minutes as Brontë, but her singular, assured, disarmingly humble presence sets the viewer up for a movie that never again reaches the heights she attained. It's the blessing and curse that Sinéad O'Connor bestowed on everyone she worked with, and everything she worked on. (Ryan Coleman)
EDIT: Billboard lists her best song. And describing Nothing Compares 2 You mentions this imagery:
Over a nearly funerary string arrangement and simple backbeat, O’Connor becomes the exemplar of the jilted, mourning lover, the spectral Cathy pawing at the window of a Heathcliff who has already moved on. (Joe Lynch)
Marie Claire mentions a Brontë connection to her teen years:
By age 14, O'Connor was already fearless – shoplifting and skipping school. She was caught stealing shoes from a friend and then money from her parents. This led to a stint in a residential training centre for girls with behavioural problems run by nuns. Upstairs was a room for the dying, where the worst young girls were sent to sleep as punishment.“I will never experience such panic and terror and agony,” she told Spin in 1990. “It wasn’t a government-run institution, it was a Catholic one, which is worse, believe me.”O’Connor found sanctuary in reading Wuthering Heights and singing. (Cameron Adams)
