'Romeo and Juliet' Was a Tragedy

In 1968, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were the most famous teenagers in the world. Fifty-five years later, they sued Paramount for child abuse.

- By Lila Shapiro

Olivia Hussey was 15 years old when Franco Zeffirelli cast her in his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. 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. 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. To make the film, Olivia, along with her co-star, Leonard Whiting, moved in with the director in his villa outside Rome. Hussey was in awe of Zeffirelli. "When he comes into the room and speaks, no one else says anything," she told a journalist at the time. "No one else can compete with anything he says, his ideas are so brilliant." Sometimes she called him "Daddy."

If he was a father figure, he wasn't a very nurturing one. His focus on her body was relentless. Before the shoot began, she was ordered to go to a doctor who prescribed her diet pills that made her ill. By the time the cameras were rolling, Olivia weighed 100 pounds and wasn't allowed to gain any weight. 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. She later reasoned he had humiliated her in order to break down her defenses. "Clever man," she wrote in her memoir. "By constantly calling attention to my body, he had drained away my embarrassment."