Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting claimed they suffered "mental anguish and emotional distress" as a result of the filming of Romeo and Juliet, filing a court case in 2023.
Warning: Mentions sexual assault.
The 1968 film made stars of Hussey, who has died at 73, and co-stars Leonard Whiting and Bruce Robinson – but at what cost?
The death of the actress Olivia Hussey at the age of 73 will inevitably be marked with tributes to her career, which included appearances in everything from the Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile to an unlikely stint as a so-called “scream queen”, with parts in the slasher film Black Christmas and the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It.
However, by far her most famous role was her appearance as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: a critically and commercially successful picture which established both her and co-star Leonard Whiting as not just exciting new stars, but zeitgeist-defining figures of the late 60s.
Yet the acclaim and fame, which included Hussey receiving a “new star of the year” Golden Globe for her performance, came at a price, and there was a darker side to the film’s production which resulted in a court case that alleged deeply unsavoury behaviour on Zeffirelli’s part.
Hussey was cast in the role after catching Zeffirelli’s eye in a theatrical adaptation of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which she had appeared opposite Vanessa Redgrave. Zeffirelli had recently had considerable success with another Shakespearean adaptation, The Taming of the Shrew, in which he cast the real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead roles of Petruchio and Kate, knowing the off-screen drama between the two would not only inform their on-screen performances but would also be invaluable for publicity. It made treble its budget at the box office and established its director as the king of modish, sexy Shakespearean films.
Still, in order for his Romeo and Juliet to succeed, Zeffirelli needed to find lead actors who would be as convincing in the central roles as Burton and Taylor were, and so he was delighted to discover Hussey.
Although the director considered as many as 500 actresses for Juliet, he said Hussey “was the only choice mature enough with experience and natural beauty to play Juliet while still looking 14″.
She beat Anjelica Huston – who may well have been cast in the role had her father, John Huston, not insisted on her appearing in his own film A Walk with Love and Death – and many other contenders, reportedly including Hussey’s friend Lavinia Lang, the then-girlfriend of Phil Collins.
Paul McCartney was a potential pick for the role of Romeo, and although he had limited acting experience, mainly playing comically heightened versions of himself, he would have brought the same level of fevered interest to the project that Burton and Taylor did in The Taming of the Shrew. In the event, Zeffirelli decided against it, after arranging meetings between the 25-year old Beatle and Hussey.
Whiting, her eventual co-star, was a professional actor who had come to attention playing the Artful Dodger in the London production of Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! – and, more challengingly, by working with Laurence Olivier in his National Theatre staging of William Congreve’s comedy Love for Love.
When Zeffirelli met Whiting, who beat 300 other actors to the role, he was smitten, saying: “He has a magnificent face, gentle melancholy, sweet, the kind of idealistic young man Romeo ought to be.” When the two actors met, there was immediate chemistry; Whiting commented that: “They say you can’t believe in love at first sight, but you can because I thought she was just absolutely scrummy, like a really big cream cake.”
The rest of the cast followed swiftly. Michael York, who would become a major star in the 70s thanks to his appearances in the Three Musketeers films, was cast as Tybalt, and the great theatrical stars Robert Stephens, John McEnery and Milo O’Shea appeared in supporting roles, suggesting Zeffirelli was keen on packing his cast with as many experienced Shakespearean actors as he could.
He was also a keen admirer of male beauty, and cast the young Bruce Robinson in the role of Romeo’s friend Benvolio. Robinson, who would later go on to achieve fame as writer and director of the cult comic classic Withnail and I, was, by his own modest estimation, “as handsome as a Renaissance prince” in his early days as an actor, and wished to move from small stage roles to film. He was therefore prepared to take what he called “the rubbish part” of Benvolio to increase his visibility for further parts. This would have unexpected, long-lasting consequences.
Romeo and Juliet began filming in Italy in the summer of 1967, using existing locations in Rome and Tuscany that reflected its low budget of $800,000 – a fraction of what it cost to make The Taming of the Shrew, which, thanks to its famous stars, had elaborate sets made for it.
Zeffirelli decided to make a virtue of the youth of both Hussey and Whiting. At the time of filming, he was 17 and she was 16; Zeffirelli therefore decided the film would be a tragedy of youth snuffed out before it had come to fruition, as well as reflecting the counter-cultural spirit of the late 60s.
His adaptation of the play cut the text to the bone, emphasised movement, music and vitality, and, most notoriously of all, included a post-coital nude scene between Hussey and Whiting, emphasising the forbidden nature of the love between the two.
During production, energy and improvisation came to the fore. Olivier, who was making another film nearby, came to watch the set, and Zeffirelli, seeing an opportunity to make his decidedly anti-establishment film fit into the wider Shakespearean canon, asked the actor if he would read the prologue that begins the play.
Olivier agreed, and then asked if he could get more involved with the picture, subsequently taking on a variety of responsibilities that included dubbing the actor Antonio Pierfederici, who was playing Romeo’s father Lord Montague, and filling in smaller roles in crowd scenes. As Zeffirelli observed, Olivier “insisted on dubbing all sorts of small parts and crowd noises in a hilarious variety of assumed voices”.
Yet there was also a darker side to Zeffirelli’s energy and theatricality. Robinson soon realised he had not been cast purely for his thespian skills when the director sat down next to him and – in lines that Robinson would later give, verbatim, to the predatory character of Uncle Monty in Withnail – asked him, “Are you a sponge or a stone?”, before trying to kiss him.
Robinson called working with the director “a horrible experience… Zeffirelli crossed a line”, and detailed how the film-maker attempted to molest him after the young actor had taken a shower, offering to dry his hair before making advances.
It was a deeply unpleasant period. Robinson later stated: “Night one, and he had his rubber gloves off. My anxiety levels increased all the time and when the film ended, I returned home and had a nervous breakdown that led me into Ramsgate Hospital.”
Even when he left the set, he tried to be the bigger and better person, trying to shake hands with his director, but Zeffirelli was having none of it, grabbing his testicles and making an obscene remark as a farewell.
It led Robinson to all but abandon an acting career, before he later became a Bafta-winning writer and acclaimed director in his own right.
Still, as he observed, “Many people had problems after working with Zeffirelli”, and this proved to be true of Hussey and Whiting, too.
The two had considerable on-screen and off-screen chemistry – Hussey said in 2018 that “I had never been with anyone before we shot the film, but Leonard and I held hands, kissed. I guess we sort of saw each other as boyfriend and girlfriend – but young. It wasn’t the way it might be today. A 15-year-old girl today is a lot more promiscuous than we were” – and for many years, Hussey loyally praised Zeffirelli, saying “[he was a] genius. He just brought things to life. That’s what I loved about Franco. He hired always the most perfect person to do the role, whichever role it was. And then he let that actor do what they felt”. And then matters changed.
At the start of 2023, both actors filed a lawsuit at the Santa Monica Supreme Court, claiming they had suffered considerable trauma as a result of Zeffirelli’s actions and directorial decisions, which they suggested amounted to sexual exploitation and the distribution of naked images of underage children.
Hussey and Whiting said they had never agreed to be filmed nude, and Zeffirelli had told them they would wear flesh-coloured underwear in their bedroom scene, before saying on the day they must be naked. He insisted they would not be shown nude on film, and the camera positioning would be tasteful. This was untrue, and Hussey’s breasts and Whiting’s buttocks are clearly visible in the picture; positively unheard-of for a mainstream Shakespearean adaptation with a PG rating.
For many years, Hussey had defended Zeffirelli’s attitude towards the film’s nudity, saying, “Nobody my age had done that before, [but] it was needed for the film.” During his lifetime, she continually suggested she was in awe of him, later working with the director on a television adaptation of Jesus of Nazareth and saying in 2018 that “I used to say to Franco, ‘I don’t want to work with anyone but you. I can do anything for you because you understand me’. I mean if I could have, I would have just worked with Franco.”
Yet she also acknowledged how stressful and traumatic the experience of achieving sudden fame at such a young age had been, saying, “It was difficult because I was painfully shy, [but] I think it was such an amazing experience.”
After the Italian director died in 2019, she and Whiting took a very different attitude towards the experience. The lawsuit, which asked the production company Paramount Pictures for more than $500 million in damages, suggested the “plaintiffs have suffered and will continue to suffer physical pain and mental pain, along with extreme and severe mental anguish and emotional distress”.
The actors’ business manager Tony Marinozzi said in a statement: “What they were told and what went on were two different things. They trusted Franco. At 16, as actors, they took his lead that he would not violate that trust they had. Franco was their friend, and frankly, at 16, what do they do? There are no options. There was no ‘Me Too’.”
Zeffirelli’s son Pippo attacked the actors for their claims, saying: “It is embarrassing to hear that today, 55 years after filming, two elderly actors who owe their notoriety essentially to this film wake up to declare that they have suffered an abuse that has caused them years of anxiety and emotional discomfort.” He also emphasised that their volte-face towards his father was at odds with their previous public utterances, saying, “It appears to me that in all these years, they have always maintained a relationship of deep gratitude and friendship towards Zeffirelli, releasing hundreds of interviews about the happy memory of their very fortunate experience, which was crowned with worldwide success.”
The case was dismissed in May 2023, on the grounds of statute of limitations and also because Hussey and Whiting were accused of “cherry-picking” aspects of the case, as well as the scene itself not being “sufficiently sexually suggestive” to count as child pornography. A similar and final ruling was made in October this year, when a re-release of the picture was not found to contravene any existing laws about underage sexuality on film.
Yet Hussey was prepared to speak far more candidly about her experience in later years. She told Variety in 2023, “We’d say, ‘Oh, it was art. Everybody does nudity – no big deal’. But really, deep down, my mum knew and my close friends knew it was traumatic. It wasn’t something I ever agreed to do. I just did it because I felt like I couldn’t say no. Leonard too.”
The role may have made Hussey a household name and a sex symbol, but it was one she regarded as a mixed experience. She earned virtually nothing – £1500 – and although she will always be remembered for the part, which led to many a young man’s sexual awakening in the late 60s, it was not one that led to a significant career.
As she recalled, “Everyone says, ‘You must be so well off – you were in a classic’. And we say, ‘No, we didn’t get paid for that’. We got minimum. We were always broke. I felt exploited, really. Looking back on all of that, Leonard and I, we felt exploited throughout.”
What happened to Hussey, as well as Whiting and Robinson, was indeed exploitation, and Zeffirelli surely deserves the opprobrium his actors have levelled at him. Yet the film that he produced remains a much-loved classic of its era, and proves the old adage that, sometimes, terrible people can produce great and enduring works of art. If only its star had not had to suffer so much in order for it to exist.
The comedian and screen icon is set to make his NZ stand-up debut this July.