For over half a century, the late Italian director Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet has been a lodestone for studying the works of William Shakespeare. Zeffirelli’s version easily trumped the play’s first screen adaptation, George Cukor’s box office flop of 1936. A stagey picture improbably starring Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer—then aged 43 and 34, respectively—with assists from a boozed-up John Barrymore and an embarrassed Basil Rathbone, it was the one film Cukor later said he wished he could do over. Baz Luhrmann’s garish 1996 update, which starred an overly emotive Leonardo DiCaprio (who later grew into a much better actor) and the then-supple but otherwise unengaging Claire Danes (who did not), overindulged in stereotypical 1990s teenage angst and was drowned out by a score drawn from that boisterous decade’s discordant music.
Today, Zeffirelli’s film looks rather dated, but it still holds the screen as a classic and remains the last Shakespearean film adaptation to be nominated for the Academy Award for best picture (it lost to Oliver! but won two Oscars, for best cinematography and best costume design). The lifelike naturalism of Zeffirelli’s direction, which infused all of his work, gestured toward ’60s sensibilities by showing brief hints of nudity, previously taboo.
When the film was released, much was made of its ingénue stars Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, who were cast at the respective ages of 15 and 16, and were 16 and 17 when they filmed much of the picture, including the nude scenes, which for a few seconds show Whiting’s buttocks and Hussey’s bare breasts. When the film was released, the starring duo enjoyed a frisson of celebrity before descending into mediocre stage and screen careers, a common fate for young actors. In the best cinematic tradition, the co-stars dated briefly before successive marriages to other people. Now aged 71 and 72, and having remained lifelong friends, they share the same manager and were professionally reunited to star in a barely noticed 2015 British film called Social Suicide, about emotionally neglected teenagers who suffer terrible fates from overinvolvement in the incipient subculture of online video sharing.
With little else going for them as they approach old age, Whiting and Hussey recently decided that their nude scenes in Romeo and Juliet—their only claim to anything approaching fame—had exploited and abused them. In a lawsuit filed against Paramount Pictures on December 30th in the superior court of Santa Monica, California, they claim Zeffirelli deceived them, and that Paramount profited from their alleged exploitation and abuse. According to their complaint, which appears to be backed by no evidence other than hearsay but seems to be contradicted by other evidence, the director told them there would be no nudity but later changed his mind, insisting that the film would fail without it. The complaint further alleges that Zeffirelli somehow secretly filmed the actors for the nude scenes—during which they are obviously both conscious and acting—without their knowledge or consent.
Zeffirelli died in 2019, at the age of 96, and conveniently cannot respond to the allegations. It is unclear if any other possible witnesses have survived to confirm or deny them, or if Paramount maintained records documenting what may or may not have happened. Whiting and Hussey are claiming sexual abuse, child exploitation, emotional distress, loss of income, fraud, and other torts. They claim to have suffered lifetimes of pain and anguish that sent them into years of therapy and left them unable to realize professional successes they believe they might otherwise have had. Since the film’s release, they claim, Paramount has been “repackaging what is essentially pornography.” Never was a story of more woe than this, it would seem. The price tag, according to their complaint, is a staggering $500 million, which they believe approximates all the revenues realized by Romeo and Juliet since its premiere.
If half a billion sounds a bit steep for a few seconds of bosom and bum, the facts surrounding the case will fortify anyone’s ample doubt. Most obviously, one could start by asking why, if the trauma of brief nudity in a celebrated film regularly shown to school children whose world premiere was attended by the Queen of England was so horrible, it took Whiting and Hussey nearly 55 years to reveal their distress in any way. They certainly did not complain about the nude scene when the film was nominated for all those awards, or four years later, when Paramount released the Oscar-winning The Godfather, in which the underaged Italian actress Simonetta Stefanelli bared her breasts before Al Pacino. Whiting and Hussey made no complaint at any time in the decades over which their nude scene was shown worldwide to millions of minors in classrooms. They said nothing through more than five years of #MeToo, and made no accusatory comments when Zeffirelli died in 2019. They also filed their lawsuit one day before the December 31st expiration of a California state law that had for three years suspended a statute of limitations on sexual abuse claims brought by individuals over the age of 40. If the matter had for decades tortured Whiting’s and Hussey’s souls and throttled their careers, why did they wait until the last moment to pursue the matter in court, and not do so at any earlier time?
Paramount’s culpability is a stretch, to say the least. The lawsuit claims the studio “knew” or “should have known” that it was trafficking in abusive and unlawfully obtained material and maliciously did nothing about it. Might it have done nothing because no one suggested that anything was amiss until less than two weeks ago? Whiting is not known to have said anything public about the nude scene, but Hussey appears to have contradicted their claims in 2018 when, on the occasion of the film’s 50th anniversary, she told Fox News that the scene “wasn’t that big of a deal,” described Zeffirelli’s shooting of it as “tasteful,” and called the film’s production crew a “big family.” If she was able to consider whether it was a “big deal” and render an aesthetic judgment about Zeffirelli’s directorial skills, it stands to reason that she was aware the scene was happening and had no problem with it. In her memoir The Girl on the Balcony, published the same year, she recalled surprise at the prospect of being filmed nude, but suggested that Zeffirelli had indicated that it was a possibility, again suggesting she knew and did not object. Hussey was in any case unbothered enough that in 1977 she went on to play the Virgin Mary in Jesus of Nazareth, a television miniseries Zeffirelli directed.
Even Hussey’s lawyer has admitted to the New York Times that her past statements will make the lawsuit “much more difficult for her to win.” That sounds like an understatement, but Zeffirelli’s adopted son Giuseppe told the Times, “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 distress.” With the prospect of generational wealth to be plucked from an industry known to take any claim of misconduct “very seriously,” their bounty, if not their honesty, might well be as boundless as the sea.
