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Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 movie, Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” starred two minors.
The two stars, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, are suing Paramount because of the film’s nude scene.
The suit states that the film constitutes child sexual exploitation.
Zeffirelli, who passed away in 2019, is accused of promising the two minors that the edited film would not contain nudity, but nudity was in the final edited production.
The two minors, actors Hussey and LWhiting, were 15 and 16 at the time of the film and now have filed a joint lawsuit in California against Paramount.
Paramount is being accused of sexually exploiting them and distributing nude images of adolescents.
Both actors say they went through mental and emotional pain and are asking for damages that are “thought to be more than $500 million.”
There is one bedroom scene with Romeo and Juliet in which one can see Hussey’s bare breasts and Whiting’s buttocks.
The actors’ attorney, Solomon Gresen, said, “Nude images of minors are unlawful and shouldn’t be exhibited.”
Gresen said, “These were very young, naive children in the ’60s who had no understanding of what was about to hit them.”
He continued, “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.”
The actors were told that they would wear flesh-colored undergarments in the bedroom scene.
But on the morning of the shoot, Zeffirelli told Whiting that they would wear only body makeup.
They were told that the camera would be set up so that there would be no naked people in the movie.
The suit states that they were filmed in the nude without their knowledge. That goes against California and federal laws that say it’s wrong to be rude or exploit children.
The suit also said, “Zeffirelli told them they must act in the nude or the Picture would fail, and their careers would be hurt.”
The actors “believed they had no choice but to act in the nude with full body makeup as demanded.”
The two actors are now in their seventies.
More on this story via Breitbart.
The legislation has opened the door to a number of high-profile lawsuits, including one against Aerosmith rocker Steven Tyler and another against actor-director Warren Beatty.
In a 2018 Variety interview tied to the festival screening, Hussey even defended the nude scene.
“Nobody my age had done that before,” she said, adding that Zeffirelli shot it tastefully. “It was needed for the film.”
