Zeffirelli, Franco

Franco Zeffirelli (12 February 1923 -15 June 2019)

Italian director Franco Zeffirelli started out as an actor in the stage productions of Luchino Visconti, then worked as an assistant on several Visconti-directed films.

After World War II, Zeffirelli launched a career designing, costuming, and directing operas, a field of entertainment to which he’d return periodically throughout his life and which led to his first directorial credit, the Swiss-produced filmization La Boheme (1965).

Zeffirelli’s reputation in the 1960s rested on his boisterous, non-traditional movie versions of Shakespeare.

“It’s hard for other people to realize just how easily we Florentines live with that past in our hearts and minds because it surrounds us in a very real way. To most people, the Renaissance is a few paintings on a gallery wall; to us it is more than an environment – it’s an entire culture, a way of life.”

He directed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a lusty adaptation of Taming of the Shrew (1967), then became an icon for the Youth Movement by casting 17-year-old Leonard Whiting and 15-year-old Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet (1968).

Zeffirelli’s eye for visual richness served him well in the opulent Brother Sun/Sister Moon (1973), a romanticized account of Francis of Assisi.

Some of Zeffirelli’s later American films were unworthy of his talents, though he made the most of the emotional possibilities of The Champ (1979) and actually helped Brooke Shields pass as an actress in the otherwise lachrymose Endless Love (1981).

The director found himself in the center of a controversy upon finishing the expensive Euro-American TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth; certain religious activists, upset that the ads promised a “human” look at Jesus, forced several sponsors to withdraw their advertising from the telecast. (The “scandal” proved groundless, since Zeffirelli’s Jesus was one of the most reverently accurate ever seen in films.)

Zeffirelli has been represented by his televised stagings of operas, many of which have shown up on American public television.

And in 1990, Franco Zeffirelli returned to Shakespeare for an all-star film version of Hamlet, wherein the “surprise” was not so much Mel Gibson’s superb rendition of the title role as the fact that this was the first movie Hamlet that looked like it was actually taking place in 12th century Denmark. —allmovie.com

1990   Hamlet (1990)
1986   Otello (1986)
1981   Endless Love (1981)
1977   Jesus of Nazareth (1977)
1972   Brother Sun, Sister Moon | Fratello sole, sorella luna (1972)
1968   Romeo and Juliet (1968)
1967   The Taming of the Shrew (1967)