Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting are in their 70s now. But back in the day, they burned up the silver screen with their portrayal of Romeo and Juliet in director Franco Zeffirelli’s remake of the classic Shakespeare love story.
In 1968, Hussey and Whiting were 15 and 16 respectively and neither had appeared in a major production. They were the fresh faces that Zeffirelli was looking for to play the roles of teens in love for the first time. Previously, actors like Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer — ages 34 and 43 — had played the roles on film.
The critics were agog. Roger Ebert said the film was “the most exciting film of Shakespeare ever made.” Perhaps it was the time the film was made, but there wasn’t that big of an outcry about the brief bedroom scene where Whiting’s bare buttocks were seen and Hussey’s naked breasts were briefly exposed.
Now, 54 years later, Hussey and Whiting are suing Paramount for sexually exploiting them and distributing nude images of adolescent children.
The suit alleges that Zeffirelli — who died in 2019 — assured both actors that there would be no nudity in the film, and that they would wear flesh-colored undergarments in the bedroom scene. But in the final days of filming, the director allegedly implored them to perform in the nude with body makeup, “or the Picture would fail.”
Hussey was 15 at the time and Whiting was 16. According to the complaint, Zeffirelli showed them where the camera would be positioned, and assured them that no nudity would be photographed or released in the film. The suit alleges that he was being dishonest and that Whiting and Hussey were in fact filmed nude without their knowledge.
“What they were told and what went on were two different things,” business manager Tony Marinozzi told Variety. “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 #MeToo.”
Indeed, it was an age where powerful directors and producers, as well as studio executives and agents, would routinely take advantage of young women. And it wasn’t just women. Actors were used and abused in ways that would be unthinkable today. Hollywood, especially in the late 1960s, was a flesh market, and the new, liberated attitude toward sex by both men and women was experienced by everyone in the industry.
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But Hussey and Whiting suing the studio more than 50 years later is silly. This is especially true since Hussey dismissed the nude scene in an interview in 2018.
In a 2018 interview with Variety, Hussey defended the nude scene.
“Nobody my age had done that before,” she said, adding that Zeffirelli shot it tastefully. “It was needed for the film.”
In another 2018 interview with Fox News, she said that the scene was “taboo” in America, but that nudity was already common in European films at the time.
There were many other ways to shoot that scene that didn’t involve exposing a 15-year-old’s breasts. Hussey being told it was “needed for the film” by a director looking for an audience grabber was just par for the course in Hollywood at the time. Using lighting, filters, camera angles — the tricks of the trade for a cinematographer — the scene could have had even more impact, more erotic heat without the nudity.
Do you want heat without nudity? How about Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not saying to Humphrey Bogart as she leaves his hotel room, “You don’t have to say anything. … Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and … blow.”
Zeffirelli’s cinematic take on one of the most romantic stories in western history was rightly honored with several awards, including a Golden Globe for Hussey. It’s a shame that more than 50 years later, Hussey and Whiting would look to cash in on the least artistic part of their masterpiece.
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