The actors who played star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film are suing Paramount Pictures for child abuse over their brief nude scene, their lawyer said Tuesday. Olivia Hussey was 15 and Leonard Whiting 16 when they starred in the Oscar-winning version of William Shakespeare’s tragedy.
The actors, now in their 70s, claim in a suit filed in Santa Monica last week that a bedroom scene in which buttocks and bare breasts are visible amounts to sexual exploitation by movie studio Paramount, and that the company was guilty of distributing nude pictures of adolescents.
The suit says Zeffirelli — who died in 2019 — cajoled them into performing the scene, telling them without it “the picture would fail”, having originally insisted there would be no actual nudity, with both actors covered by flesh-coloured underwear.
“Defendants were dishonest and secretly filmed the nude or partially nude minor children without their knowledge, in violation of the state and federal laws regulating indecency and exploitation of minors for profit,” the suit says.
The complaint, which claims damages of hundreds of millions of dollars, says the two performers have suffered mental anguish and emotional distress in the five-and-a-half decades since the film came out, and that both had only limited professional success in its wake.