From Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver to Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon, are films that used teen actors for sexual roles heading for a reckoning? As Paramount is sued over Romeo and Juliet, we look at the scenes cinema and TV might want to forget
Spoiler alert: Romeo and Juliet does not have a happy ending. But Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of the Shakespeare play did – at least until recently. The 1968 movie was a huge commercial success and became a secondary school fixture. Its stars, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, even briefly dated – a dream come true publicity-wise. But now it has emerged that the pair are suing the studio, Paramount, for $500m over Zeffirelli’s handling of a scene in which both actors, then 16 and 17, briefly appeared partially naked. According to the complaint, the actors “were told by Mr Zeffirelli that they must act in the nude or the picture will fail”.
As with the music industry, cinema has tended to gloss over such incidents with the “It was a different time” excuse. This could be seen as a concerted effort to keep the lid on what many suspect to be quite a can of worms. Hussey and Whiting’s lawsuit could represent the long-dreaded can-opener.
