1968 'Romeo & Juliet' Stars Sue Paramount $500Mln Over Nude Scene Filmed When They Were Minors

'Romeo and Juliet; - a two-part film directed by Franco Zeffirelli - won two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards and many others prizes. The film had shots of the main actors while nude, which caused a lot of controversy at the time. Now they say that the director, Franco Zeffirelli, deceived them.

Olivia Hussey, 71, and Leonard Whiting, 72, filed a $500 million lawsuit against Paramaunt Pictures, 55 years after the filming of "Romeo & Juliet", in which they starred. They claimed that the director, Franco Zeffirelli, had broken his promise of no nudity scenes on the pretext that otherwise the picture "would fail".

In the scene under discussion, Romeo and Juliet part after spending the night together. There are images of Whiting's buttocks and Hussey's bare breasts.

"What they were told and what went on were two different things," stated Tony Marinozzi, both actors' business manager. "They trusted Franco. At 16, as actors, they took his lead that he would not violate that trust they had. Franco was their friend, and frankly, at 16, what do they do? There are no options. There was no #MeToo."

The suit was filed on December 30, 2022, in Santa Monica Superior Court in California. The plaintiffs accuse the defendant of sexual harassment, fraud, sexual abuse, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The lawsuit reportedly states that the director insisted on doing a nude shoot with a body make-up in the final days of filming - while initially, the actors had been told to perform a bed scene in flesh-colored underwear.

Moreover, it was stated that Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, was dishonest with the actors because he said that the cameras would be filmed in such a way that nudity would not be in the frame. That is, the actors were alledgedly filmed naked without their knowledge.

16-year-old British actress Olivia Hussey and 17-year-old British actor Leonard Whiting, who play the leading roles in Franco Zeffirelli's film version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, are seen during the rehearsal for the Royal Film Performance which will take place tomorrow night in London. Mar. 3, 1968. (AP Photo/Bob Dear)

© AP Photo / Bob Dear

Hussey was 15 at the time and Whiting was 16.

"Nude images of minors are unlawful and shouldn't be exhibited," said the actors’ attorney, Solomon Gresen, in an interview with American magazine. "These were very young naive children in the ’60s who had no understanding of what was about to hit them. All of a sudden they were famous at a level they never expected, and in addition they were violated in a way they didn’t know how to deal with."

Accrding to the American media, the suit relies, among other things, on a California law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations for older claims of child sexual abuse. This law had a deadline of December 31, 2022.