Legendary Director of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Franco Zeffirelli Dies at 96

Legendary Director of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Franco Zeffirelli Dies at 96
Franco Zeffirelli, seen in New York, on Oct. 31, 1974. (Jerry Mosey/AP Photo)

The renowned and controversial Italian director, Franco Zeffirelli, perhaps best known for the “Romeo and Juliet” production, died in Rome at the age of 96.

His son Luciano said that his father Franco Zeffirelli had died in his home on June 15, “He had suffered for a while, but he left in a peaceful way,” he said.

He was nominated for the Oscar Academy award twice. While he was most popularly known for his films, perhaps his biggest contribution was the popularization, adaptation, and production of the classical repertoire.

“Franco Zeffirelli, one of the world’s greatest men of culture, passed away this morning,” wrote Dario Nardella, mayor of Florence, on Twitter. “Goodbye dear Maestro, Florence will never forget you.”

He said that he didn’t have any preferences for his three mediums for expressing art: film, theater, and opera.

“I am not a film director. I am a director who uses different instruments to express his dreams and his stories—to make people dream,” Zeffirelli told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview.

Showing great flexibility, he produced classics for the world’s most famous opera houses, from Milan’s venerable La Scala to the Metropolitan in New York, and plays for London and Italian stages.

He was born in Florence on Feb. 12, 1923, becoming one of Italy’s most outstanding directors, eventually working with big names such as Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Maria Callas, as well Hollywood stars including Elizabeth Taylor and Mel Gibson.

He was one of the few Italian directors that had a close connection to the Vatican, some of the live telecasts of the church made use of his artistic set-up, such as the  1978 papal installation and the 1983 Holy Year opening ceremonies in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi also tapped him to direct a few high-profile events.

Zeffirelli was best known overseas for his romantic films. The most famous one is the 1968 “Romeo and Juliet,” which brought Shakespeare’s work to the modern digital stage. The film cost only $1.5 million, and it grossed $52 million, becoming the greatest Shakespearean triumph movie ever.

He turned to more spiritual subjects later on the 1970s, most notably, the 1977 “Life of Jesus.” The film was very successful, earning more than $300 million.

In 1978, he made threats to leave Italy permanently because of stringent attacks against him and his art by leftist groups in Italy, who saw him as an exponent of Hollywood.

On the other hand, piqued by American criticism of his 1981 movie “Endless Love,” starring Brooke Shields, Zeffirelli said he might never make another film in the United States. The movie, as he predicted, was a box office success.

Zeffirelli wrote about the then-scandalous circumstances of his birth in his 2006 autobiography, recounting how his mother attended her husband’s funeral pregnant with another man’s child. Unable to give the baby either her or his father’s names, she intended to name him Zeffiretti, after an aria in Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutti,” but a typographical error made it Zeffirelli, making him “the only person in the world with Zeffirelli as a name, thanks to my mother’s folly.”

His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 6, and Zeffirelli went to live with his father’s cousin, whom he affectionately called Zia (Aunt) Lide.

During this time, he was visited weekly by his father and he became strongly interested in classical art, particularly opera, after seeing  Wagner’s “Walkuere” at age 8 or 9 in Florence. His second passion was for English culture and literature, as his father had him go to thrice weekly English lessons with a British expatriate residing in Florence.

Zeffirelli served with the partisans during World War II. He later acted as an interpreter for British troops.

The lifelong bachelor turned from architecture to acting at the age of 20 when he joined an experimental troupe in his native city.

After a short-lived acting career, Zeffirelli worked with Luchino Visconti’s theatrical company in Rome, where he showed a flair for dramatic staging techniques in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Troilus and Cressida.” He later served as an assistant director under Italian film masters Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio De Sica.

In 1950, he began a long and fruitful association with lyric theater, working as a director, set designer and costumist, and bringing new life to works by his personal favorites—Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi.

Over the next decade, he staged dozens of operas, romantic melodramas and contemporary works in Italian and other European theaters, eventually earning a reputation as one of the world’s best directors of musical theater.

Both La Scala and New York’s Metropolitan Opera later played host to Zeffirelli’s classic staging of “La Boheme,” which was shown nationally on American television in 1982.

When Zeffirelli decided to do “La Traviata” on film, he had already worked his stage version of the opera into a classic, performed at Milan’s La Scala with soprano Maria Callas. He had been planning the film since 1950, he said.

“In the last 30 years, I’ve done everything a lyric theater artist can do,” Zeffirelli wrote in an article for Italy’s Corriere della Sera as the film was released in 1983. “This work is the one that crowns all my hopes and gratifies all my ambitions.”

The film, with Teresa Stratas and Placido Domingo in the lead roles, found near-unanimous critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic—a rarity for Zeffirelli—and received Oscar nominations for costuming, scenography and artistic direction.

Zeffirelli worked on a new staging of La Traviata as his last project, which will open the 2019 Opera Festival on June 21 at the Verona Arena. “We’ll pay him a final tribute with one of his most loved operas,” said artistic director Cecilia Gasdia. “He’ll be with us.”

“I’m 83 and I’ve really been working like mad since I was a kid. I’ve done everything, but I never really feel that I have said everything I have to say,” Zeffirelli told The Associated Press shortly before the opening of “Aida.”

 

 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

ntd newsletter icon
Sign up for NTD Daily
What you need to know, summarized in one email.
Stay informed with accurate news you can trust.
By registering for the newsletter, you agree to the Privacy Policy.
Comments