![]() She inspired a collectible doll in South Korea and was the cover girl for the Yardley cosmetics campaign (a shoot she says she was never paid for). They were the two most famous teenagers in the world, and Olivia’s face was everywhere. “I had crossed over from one state into another.” Olivia and Leonard, meanwhile, each made less than $3,000.įor almost a year, they promoted the film. It made him rich and internationally renowned. “The effect on me was stunning,” he wrote in his autobiography. For Zeffirelli, who had been known mostly as a director of lavish opera productions, its popularity was transformative. Its success helped revive Paramount, which had been on the verge of closing after a series of flops. The film was hugely profitable for both Zeffirelli and Paramount, yielding what was then the highest ratio of investment to earnings in the studio’s history. “I think it works better that way,” said Leonard. “It doesn’t look dirty,” Olivia told one reporter at the time. Which is just right.” When Olivia and Leonard were asked about the scene, they too said it was just right. “In the bed you can see the long line of his backbone. “You can see her flesh, which is like an apricot,” Zeffirelli told a reporter for The Observer in 1967. On the poster, Olivia lies on Leonard’s bare chest, her long dark hair falling down her back. In the marketing materials, Paramount, the film’s distributor, emphasized Olivia and Leonard’s youth and their nudity. It was sexy and beautiful and sad, and it reflected a common fixation of the era: young people fighting to get their own way in a world set against them. Zeffirelli had turned Shakespeare’s complex tale of a status-obsessed mercantile society into a fever dream of teenage rebellion and youthful lust perfectly suited to the tempestuous climate of 1968. In the end, the scene proved central to the film’s good fortune. She didn’t realize this moment made the final cut until she saw the film for the first time at its royal premiere in London, where she sat behind Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and the queen. Olivia did not realize she would be fully undressed until that morning, when the makeup man arrived and announced he was there to make her up “head to toe.” Panicking, she ran to Zeffirelli, who promised her the audience would see only “a hint - a bare back, a shoulder.” For most of the shoot, she lay in bed holding the sheet over her chest, but Zeffirelli had placed her nightgown out of reach so that her nipples were briefly exposed when she rose to get it. He shot the couple naked in bed together, covered only by a sheet and the angle of the camera. In a departure from Shakespeare’s text, he moved the young lovers’ postcoital scene from Juliet’s balcony to her bedroom. Zeffirelli waited until nearly the end of production to shoot the film’s most controversial scene. “By constantly calling attention to my body, he had drained away my embarrassment.” She later reasoned he had humiliated her in order to break down her defenses. When she told Zeffirelli she was self-conscious about her chest and wasn’t sure about wearing a low-cut dress, he gave her the nickname “Boobs O’Mina,” which he would shout into a megaphone whenever he wanted her on set. By the time the cameras were rolling, Olivia weighed 100 pounds and wasn’t allowed to gain any weight. Before the shoot began, she was ordered to go to a doctor who prescribed her diet pills that made her ill. ![]() If he was a father figure, he wasn’t a very nurturing one. “No one else can compete with anything he says, his ideas are so brilliant.” Sometimes she called him “Daddy.” ![]() “When he comes into the room and speaks, no one else says anything,” she told a journalist at the time. To make the film, Olivia, along with her co-star, Leonard Whiting, moved in with the director in his villa outside Rome. Her parents had split up when she was 1, and she hadn’t seen her father, an Argentine singer, since she was 7 her mother, a British secretary who worked three jobs, wasn’t around on set. She had been a working stage actor for a few years but was unknown in the world of film and had no agent or manager. ![]() Olivia Hussey was 15 years old when Franco Zeffirelli cast her in his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. ![]()
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