Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Sunday December 29, 2024
Olivia Hussey (1951-2024)
Hussey, age 16, in the most famous love story of all.
Franco Zeffirelli's “Romeo and Juliet” premiered in March 1968, was released in the U.S. in October 1968, and was shown in high schools across the country throughout the 1970s and '80s, where the boys quickly fell in love with Olivia Hussey. I was one of them. I still feel the tug 50 years later. Yes, there were jokes about her name, and yes, there was hullabaloo around the post-coital scene where you got a flash of something they don't normally show during school assemblies, but I didn't pay either any mind. To me, her face was enough. That's why you fell in love.
Shockingly, she was only 15 when she was cast, 16 during filming, and 17 when the movie hit the big screen. I believe that's what Zeffirelli wanted: actors whose ages approximated the ages of the title characters. So where does one go after playing the most iconic tragic heroine in the most iconic interpretation of the generation? Her first post-Juliet role, in “All the Right Noises,” played off her age in a way that hasn't aged well. “A married theatre lighting technician with two small children has an affair with a teenage actress,” is the IMDb descripton. Its tagline: “Is 15 1/2 too young for a girl? Is one wife enough for one man?”
It feels like she got some bad career advice. She made a couple of Italian movies with Robert Mitchum's son, Christopher, was one of the leads in a musical remake of a 1930s classic (“Lost Horizon”) that bombed with both critics and audiences, did a well-received horror flick (“Black Christmas”), then played someone even more iconic that Juliet: the Virgin Mary in the TV miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth.” She did ensemble murder mysteries (“Death on the Nile”), classics (“Ivanhoe”), and dystopian thrillers (“Turkey Shoot”). In the '90s she acted in some classic horror franchises: “It” and “Psycho IV: The Beginning.” In the latter she played Norma Bates, the mother who birthed a maniac, another iconic role. Maybe that's the trivia question from her career: Who has played Juliet Montague, the Virgin Mary and Norma Bates?
Hussey married three times, to Dean Paul Martin (1971-79), Akira Fuse (1980-89), and David Glen Eisley (1991-her death), and had a child with each man. She died two days after Christmas, age 73, from breast cancer. Time to repeat some Shakespeare: Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath/ Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.