text: He is better known for being a romantic hero due to his youthful love for Catherine Earnshaw, than for his final years of vengeance in the second half of the novel, during which he grows into a bitter, haunted man, and for a number of incidents in his early life that suggest that he was an upset and sometimes malicious individual from the beginning. His complicated, mesmerizing, absorbing, and altogether bizarre nature makes him a rare character, incorporating elements of both the hero and villain. Actors who have portrayed Heathcliff on screen include Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy.
  Character
  You teach me now how cruel you've been—cruel and false!  Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy?  I have not one word of comfort.  You deserve this.  You have killed yourself.  Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you—they'll damn you.  You loved me—then what right had you to leave me?  What right—answer me—for the poor fancy you felt for Linton?  Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it.  I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.  So much the worse for me, that I am strong.  Do I want to live?  What kind of living will it be when you—oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?