The son of Franco Zeffirelli has hit out against the two lead actors from the late Italian film director’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, who are suing Paramount Studios for child abuse over a nude scene in the film.
Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, who were 15 and 16, respectively, when the film was made, allege that Zeffirelli made them perform a bedroom scene in the nude after originally saying they would be wearing flesh-coloured body suits.
The director, who died in 2019, allegedly warned them that “the film would fail” if they didn’t perform the scene nude.
On Friday, Pippo Zeffirelli, who is also the president of the Franco Zeffirelli Foundation, said in a statement that the love scene was “far from pornographic”.
“Zeffirelli himself was accused of being reactionary precisely because, over and over again, he spoke out against pornography,” he added. “The nude images in the film express the beauty, the transfer, I would even say the candour of mutual giving and do not contain any morbid feeling.”
Romeo and Juliet was among Zeffirelli’s biggest successes, winning two Oscars. Hussey and Whiting, now in their seventies, each won a Golden Globe for their performances.
In the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles on 30 December, Hussey and Whiting accuse Paramount of sexually exploiting them as young actors and distributing nude scenes of adolescents. They also claim to have suffered “mental anguish and emotional distress” in the years since the film was made and to have lost out on job opportunities. Damages are being sought “believed to be in excess of $500m”.
The actors’ lawyer, Solomon Gresen, told Variety earlier this week that the nude scene was filmed when the pair “were very young naive children in the 1960s who had no understanding of what was about to hit them”.
Zeffirelli said he believed the film’s two producers, John Brabourne and Anthony Havelock-Allan, had consent forms from the actors’ parents.
“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 added.
“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.”
Zeffirelli pointed out that Hussey went on to work in Franco Zeffirelli’s miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, and that Whiting attended his funeral.
