"In every old man's eye...:" The retroactive significance of the Romeo and Juliet lawsuit
Last week, Variety reported that Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, the stars of director Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, had filed a lawsuit with the state of California accusing Paramount, the film’s studio, of sexual exploitation and for distributing nudes images of adolescent children. The suit relies in part on a law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations for older claims of child sexual abuse; Hussey’s and Whiting’s attorney filed just under the wire, making the cutoff and sparking a conversation about what happened to two teenagers on a film set nearly fifty-six years ago.
Zeffirelli’s film — which, at the time of its release, straddled a divergent American culture that, on the one hand, favored old-fashioned British entertainment (e.g. Oliver!, The Lion in Winter), and, on the other, hippiedom and free love — was a major critical and commercial success, becoming one of the highest-grossing movies of its year. But, as has become readily apparent in the wake of the #MeToo movement, success in Hollywood does not preclude inappropriate or even violent behavior from powerful men working behind the scenes.
According to Hussey’s and Whiting’s lawsuit, Zeffirelli coerced his adolescent actors to perform Romeo and Juliet’s bedroom scene fully naked. He’d initially told them that they’d be wearing flesh-colored garments in the scene, but, in the days leading up to filming, told them that “the picture would fail,” and that “they would never work again in any profession, let alone Hollywood,” if they did not comply.
Zeffirelli — who would also go on to direct a fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields in Endless Love (‘81), a movie which received an X-rating from the MPAA before its sex scenes were edited down — also assured Hussey and Whiting that the camera had been positioned so as not to capture any of their nudity. This too was a lie, and in the finished film, Hussey’s breasts and Whiting’s buttocks are clearly visible.
As result of all this, Hussey and Whiting claim that they’ve experienced mental anguish and emotional distress in the decades since. Furthermore, they allege that their nudity in Romeo and Juliet inflicted a strain on their careers, causing casting agents to view them as pornographic rather than dramatic actors, thus excluding them from various opportunities.
“All of a sudden they were famous at a level they never expected,” says Solomon Gresen, the actors’ lawyer, “and in addition they were violated in a way they didn’t know how to deal with.”
This “not knowing how to deal” is a response to trauma, a deer-in-headlights reaction that lingers into adulthood, and can make a victim of abuse a mouthpiece for justifying or excusing that behavior. In a five-year-old interview, Hussey defended the nude scene, claiming, “It wasn’t that big of a deal,” and that the scene was “needed for the film.”
It is too easy, and reductive, to harness these past words against the actor’s present legal actions. Indeed, there has been some critique of Hussey’s and Whiting’s claims — specifically that, at the time of Romeo and Juliet’s filming, they were older, by one year, than the ages listed in their lawsuit. (Hussey says she was fifteen, while Whiting says he was sixteen.) But these disputes are founded on the assumption that their anguish is focused solely on the moment when Zeffirelli filmed the scene, i.e., the moment of assault, in mid-1967; it is entirely possible, or even probable, that the director made promises to his young actors about the exclusion of nudity when they signed onto the project a year earlier.
Lying to actors to elicit a performance is always an unprofessional tactic, but it is especially so when the actors in question are underage, or at the very precipice of adulthood. A director’s job is to bolster performers, not undermine their integrity, and if Hussey’s and Whiting’s allegations are accurate, then it is clear that their senses of inner and public agency were distinctly injured at a moment of profound physical and social change in their lives.
“Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye,” mutters the benevolent Friar Lawrence (Milo O’Shea) while considering the precarious fates of his young wards. “And, where care lodges, sleep will never lie." Franco Zeffirelli has been in the grave for nearly four years, but his actors, now themselves in the final acts of their lives, are still trying to put their memories of his lack of care to rest.
