Faye Dunaway turned down a role of Regan in a British television production of Re Lear (1983) starring Sir Laurence Olivier to be in this movie.
This movie is notable for a whip-fight between two women, which was not in the original novel, but was already in The Wicked Lady (1945). The scene caused a controversy, as the British Board of Film Classification wanted to impose a cut, and director Michael Winner refused to cut the notorious sequence, lobbying with such fellow director colleagues as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and John Schlesinger, as well as author Kingsley Amis to defend retention of the scene. The scene stayed, but the movie's release was delayed.
During an interview, Marina Sirtis talked about how being nude for the whip fight didn't bother her. "I'm British, and we don't really have an issue with nudity in Europe. When people say to me, 'You took your clothes off a lot when you started!,' my response to that is, 'If it was good enough for Helen Mirren, it's good enough for me.' We both took our clothes off a lot in the beginning. Because guess what? Everyone has a body. When I'm in Europe, when I was young, we'd go to the topless beaches, we took our clothes off at the beach. [Nudity] is not a thing. It's only in America that it's a thing. It's a thing here. It's not a thing in the rest of the Western world."
Some of the silk on the seventeenth century silk dresses worn by Faye Dunaway was so delicate and fragile that it had to be mounted on other fabrics so as to protect and preserve it.
This movie is based on the true story of highway-woman Lady Kathleen Ferrers. The Wicked Lady lived at the Markyate Cell manor in the village of Markyate which was near Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. The name Lady Kathleen Ferrers was changed to Barbara Skelton for the novel written by Magdalen King-Hall. This book was adapted for this movie and La bella avventuriera (1945).