Carol White turned down the role of Ursula, despite being reportedly offered £10,000 to play the role.
Michael Caine turned down the role of Gerald.
Glenda Jackson was pregnant throughout the shoot. In referring to her nude scenes, she said she'd never had such a "wonderful bosom."
Glenda Jackson was the first actress to win an Oscar for a role in which there was a nude scene.
Michael Gough was cast after shooting had begun when it was decided that the actor originally given the role was miscast.
According to Larry Kramer in his book, "We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer", both Faye Dunaway and Vanessa Redgrave were approached to play the role of Ursula.
According to director Ken Russell, the film is set in the year 1920, just two years after the end of World War I.
Both Oliver Reed and Alan Bates were initially apprehensive about filming the legendary wrestling scene due to insecurity over who had the largest "member". Eventually, after both actors got drunk, compared sizes and realized there was little difference between the two, filming continued with relative ease.
Considered, along with Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, to be among the first mainstream movies to feature male frontal nudity.
First film of Christopher Gable.
In 1971, United Artists successfully reissued this film in the USA on a double bill with the similarly steamy Midnight Cowboy.
In a scene between Glenda Jackson's and Vladek Sheybal's characters, she declares herself to be Antonina Milyukova, a nymphomaniac married to Tchaikovsky; he, pretending to be the composer replies "but I am a homosexual". The following year, Jackson would play Milyukova, a nymphomaniac married to a gay man, in the Ken Russell film The Music Lovers (1970).
Is ranked #87 on the British Film Insitute's top 100.
Some of the characters in this movie, and the novel it's based on, are based on real-life people, mostly members of the "Bloomsbury Group" which whom D. H. Lawrence was acquainted. For example, Loerke was based on painter Mark Gertler, and Hermione is a very unflattering portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was upset over this novel that she ended her friendship with Lawrence and never spoke to him again.
The nude wrestling scene posed problems for UK censor John Trevelyan, and the film was only passed after Ken Russell made some edits to the original print to reduce full-length shots of Rupert and Gerald standing motionless before the wrestling begins and to darken shots of sunlight streaming into the room. The sex scenes between Gerald and Gudrun were also reduced on the censor's request. After the edits were made, the film was granted an 'X' certificate.
Was banned in Turkey because the nude wrestling scene was considered as a graphic gay sex scene.