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 on Friday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 73.
The cause was breast cancer, her publicist, Natalie Beita, said.
Ms. 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. Ms. 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. The actor Leslie Howard had been 43 when he made his debut as Romeo for a 1936 adaptation.
What Ms. Hussey and Mr. Whiting lacked in practiced elocution they more than made up for in an emotional intensity that suggested total identification with their characters.
Mr. Whiting sprinted from Juliet’s bedroom with a wild but innocent exuberance. Ms. Hussey responded to the suggestion of Juliet’s nursemaid (Pat Heywood) that she go through with a pragmatic marriage to a man other than Romeo with an extraordinary facial expression — wide-eyed, horrified, stupefied — that occurred in just an instant, yet suggested 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,” crediting 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 Ms. Hussey and Mr. Whiting’s stardom. “These are the most talked-about teenagers in the world today,” the narrator says.
Ms. Hussey traveled all over the world promoting the film, tried to accustom herself to her lunches consisting of two 30-minute interviews and 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 Ms. 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 Mr. Whiting and Ms. Hussey are depicted waking up nude in bed together. The camera lingers on Mr. Whiting’s bare buttocks and registers a flash of Ms. Hussey’s breasts.
Mr. Ebert castigated those scrutinizing the moment — “A lot of fuss has been made about the brief, beautiful nude love scene,” he wrote — and Ms. Hussey seemed initially to feel the same way, describing Mr. Zeffirelli as a father figure whom she would have liked to work with on all of her movies.
In her 2018 memoir, “The Girl on the Balcony,” a more ambivalent attitude emerged.
With Mr. Zeffirelli’s assurance, she wrote, she had thought she would be clothed in the scene, until she found herself getting makeup “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 about her nude scene in 2018.
Yet in the same interview, 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.” Mr. Zeffirelli wrote an adoring foreword to the book.
Ms. Hussey’s attitude took another turn in December 2022, when she and Mr. 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 for claims of child sexual abuse.
A judge threw out the suit in May 2023 on a number of grounds, including that the scene was not actually pornographic.
New York magazine reported that at the time of the suit she was $22,000 in debt. In an interview with Variety, Ms. Hussey said that she and Mr. Whiting had 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 on April 17, 1951, in Buenos Aires. Her father, Andreas Osuna, was a tango singer. He and Joy Hussey divorced when Olivia was 2, and Ms. Hussey took her and Olivia’s brother, Andrew, to her native England, where she worked as a legal secretary in London. Mr. Osuna was not involved in Olivia’s upbringing, and she and her brother used their mother’s surname.
Joy was an observant Catholic, and Olivia walked around her home with a towel on her head, pretending to be a nun. She realized that what she liked was not the idea of being a nun, but the activity of pretending. 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 a second audition in what was initially a three-week television special, before Paramount expressed interest.
Ms. Hussey was known for playing the Virgin Mary in another Zeffirelli film, “Jesus of Nazareth” (1977), and for playing 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 later earned Ms. Hussey the reputation, The New York Times reported in 2015, as the “prototype” of the final female survivor of a slasher film.
In later interviews, she said that the success of “Romeo and Juliet” made her both exhausted and jaded, causing her to turn down roles in movies opposite John Wayne and Richard Burton and focus instead on her personal life. She often said that she wished she had approached her career differently but that she was proud of her three children.
Ms. 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 the 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.
Mr. Whiting, a lifelong friend of Ms. Hussey’s, once sent her a darkly comic screenplay he wrote in which Romeo and Juliet live on after their youth. Ms. 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 Mr. 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,” Ms. Hussey told 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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