By Alex Traub
Olivia Hussey, whose performance as the female lead in a 1968 film adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” became its own Shakespearean tale, encompassing glory improbably achieved, helplessness with newfound power and memories that darkened over the years, died Dec. 27 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 73.
The cause was breast cancer, her publicist, Natalie Beita, said.
Hussey’s lifelong association with Juliet came from how rapturously that movie was received. Much of the reaction concentrated on the decision of its director, Franco Zeffirelli, to cast two unknown teenagers as his leads. Hussey was 15 when filming began; her co-star, Leonard Whiting, was 17.
It was standard at the time to give the roles of the desperate lovers to established stars. Leslie Howard, for one, was 43 when he made his debut as Romeo in a 1936 adaptation.
What Hussey and Whiting lacked in practiced elocution they more than made up for in emotional intensity, suggesting an identification with their characters.
Whiting sprinted from Juliet’s bedroom with a wild but innocent exuberance. When Juliet’s nursemaid (Pat Heywood) counseled that Juliet go through with a pragmatic marriage to a man other than Romeo, Hussey responded with an extraordinary facial expression — wide-eyed, horrified, stupefied — suggesting that it was her first encounter with the possibility of betraying love.
In a review for The Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote, “I believe Franco Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is the most exciting film of Shakespeare ever made.” He credited the film with “the passion, the sweat, the violence, the poetry, the love and the tragedy in the most immediate terms I can imagine.”
The movie grossed nearly $39 million at the domestic box office (about $350 million today) and it won Academy Awards for cinematography and costumes.
A featurette on the making of the film captures the tenor of Hussey and Whiting’s stardom. “These are the most talked-about teenagers in the world today,” the narrator says.
Hussey traveled widely promoting the film. At one point, in Britain, she did so much dancing at a dinner with Prince Charles that she took her shoes off, stretched her legs across his lap and received a royal foot massage.
Yet in the years to come Hussey did not have another big role that earned both box-office success and critical acclaim. She spent much time commemorating her role as Juliet.
One part of the movie was remembered for something other than artistry: a brief scene in which Romeo and Juliet wake up nude in bed together. The camera lingers on Whiting’s buttocks and registers a flash of Hussey’s breasts.
Ebert castigated those who were scandalized by the scene — “A lot of fuss has been made about the brief, beautiful nude love scene,” he wrote — and Hussey seemed initially to feel the same way, describing Zeffirelli as a father figure whom she would have liked to work with on all of her movies.
But in her 2018 memoir, “The Girl on the Balcony,” she was more ambivalent.
With Zeffirelli’s assurance, she wrote, she had thought she would be clothed in the scene, until she found herself having makeup applied “head to toe,” prompting what she called a “small panic attack.” One “dirty old man” on the crew, she wrote, had to be removed from the set.
“Nobody my age had done that before,” she told Variety in 2018, referring to the nude scene. Yet, she added, “It was needed for the film.”
During her press tour for the book, she told Fox News that the scene “was done very tastefully” and “wasn’t that big of a deal.” Zeffirelli wrote an adoring foreword to the book.
Hussey’s attitude took another turn in December 2022, when she and Whiting sued Paramount Pictures, the film’s distributor, seeking damages of up to $500 million, claiming that they had been forced to appear nude and that the movie constituted “child pornography.” The suit was prompted by a California law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations on claims of child sexual abuse.
A judge threw out the suit in May 2023, ruling that the scene was not pornographic.
New York magazine reported that at the time of the suit Hussey was $22,000 in debt. In an interview with Variety, Hussey said that she and Whiting had each received only 1,500 British pounds (roughly $35,000 today) for their performances.
“Looking back on all of that, Leonard and I, we felt exploited throughout,” she said.
Olivia Osuna was born April 17, 1951, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Andreas Osuna and Joy Hussey. Her father was a tango singer. Her parents divorced when Olivia was 2, and her mother took her and Olivia’s brother, Andrew, to her native England, where she worked as a legal secretary in London. The children used their mother’s surname.
Joy Hussey was an observant Roman Catholic, and Olivia would walk around her home with a towel on her head, pretending to be a nun, she recalled. She realized that what she liked was not the idea of being a nun but pretending to be one. She started attending drama school as a little girl.
In 1966, Olivia starred in a stage adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” alongside Vanessa Redgrave. She got the role of Juliet after two auditions.
Olivia Hussey played the Virgin Mary in another Zeffirelli film, “Jesus of Nazareth” (1977), and the titular role in “Mother Teresa,” a 2003 television biopic. She also starred in “Black Christmas” (1974), a horror movie that was panned at the time but that later earned Hussey the reputation as the “prototype” of the last female survivor of a slasher film, as The New York Times reported in 2015.
In later interviews, she said that the success and hoopla surrounding “Romeo and Juliet” had exhausted her, causing her to turn down movie roles opposite John Wayne and Richard Burton and to focus instead on her personal life.
Hussey’s first three marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her husband, David Eisley; a son, Alexander Martin, from her first marriage, to Dean Paul Martin, the son of singer Dean Martin; another son, Maximillian Fuse, from her third marriage, to Akira Fuse, a Japanese pop star; a daughter, India Eisley; her brother; and a grandson. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008.
Whiting, a lifelong friend of Hussey’s, once sent her a darkly comic screenplay he wrote in which Romeo and Juliet live on after their youth. Hussey responded that she could not play the part, she told Variety in 2018, for the same reason that she never went out in sweatpants: She wished to keep alive the public image of herself as Shakespeare’s Juliet.
That was how she met Eisley. He saw her at a delicatessen and introduced himself as someone who had seen her performance in “Romeo and Juliet” 50 times. He turned out to know every line of the play.
“I couldn’t resist him,” Hussey told the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2002. “I am such a die-hard romantic. I guess a part of me thinks I am Juliet.”
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