So many of us were profoundly affected by this movie. I don't know how old you were, but realize that you are seeing a 15-year-old girl:
ADDED: In 2019, I blogged about this movie as part of a project of rewatching movies that I had watched when they came out and had not rewatched since:
I saw Franco Zeffirelli's version of the Shakespeare play when I was 17. Olivia Hussey (Juliet) was born in 1951, like me. She was 16 when the movie was made. Leonard Whiting (Romeo) was only one year older. We're told quite clearly in the text of the play that Juliet is 13. These are young kids indeed. They fall madly in love one night, get married the very next day, everything suddenly goes to hell, and on the fourth day, they're both dead....
So emotional! But what was it like watching it again half a century later? Beautifully fresh and alive. The story is so fast moving and the teenagers get so overheated — with lots of love and crazy streetfighting — but that's the story and I got caught up in the wildness and the extremely painful sadness in the end — in 1968 and in 2019.
I don't know whether Hussey was 15 or 16 when the movie was filmed. I am simply finding these numbers in stories I am reading. There is also some questioning of whether Juliet in the play is 13 or 14.
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Does it make a difference if you are seeing a 16 year old girl?
According to the article, at the time of the filming, Hussey was 15. The date of the release of the movie is irrelevant (other than, perhaps, to calculate how old you were when you first saw it).
According to other sources she was cast at 15 but the scene was filmed at 16.
I should say that I'm stating a fact about her age based on this obituary. On another occasion I wrote about this movie and stated that her age was 16 (based on something else that I read).
Great music theme.
It's a tremendous loss for us all that Olivia Hussey was born a little too late to be Suze Rotolo.
For a time, she was married to Dean Martin’s son.
Interestingly, a Mennonite FB friend believes that the modern concept of romantic love is destructive and fiendish. I never really understood until I heard Scott Adams describe it thus (and I paraphrase): “if a cartel sicario managed to cross the border to Berkeley, some empathetic young woman would pitch a cot for him in her apartment.” The drive to find genetically diverse sperm in women is awesome.
Yah. In eighth grade our english class spent two days watching this on the ancient dial up AV system in the dark little room off the library. The nasty Brookline English Witch would come in, turn on the machine and leave us boys and girls to the…story, crammed in the little room…crammed together. The tension…
I prefer Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet". However, when Hussey delivers her final line, "O happy dagger, this is thy sheath," it's one of the most powerful moments put on film. I'm getting chills right now remembering how earnest and heartbroken she is. She took all the potential of Shakespeare's clever dialogue and brought even more to the scene. RIP.
Natalie Portman was cast at 13, then after rehearsals dropped because she looked 13.
I was 14 when I saw it with my English class. I loved it. I didn’t give a thought to the age of the characters or actors.
My sophomore English class took a trip to the theater (theatre) to watch it. My most vivid memory was the sophomoric tittering at the sight of Romeo’s bare butt.
Gulliver emerges naked from a stream where he has bathed. Just as author Swift was unusual for his frequent bathing, so is Gulliver. A Yahoo girl, always naked like all of her kind, attacks him, obviously wanting sex and having a good idea what goes where. She may be seeking an Irish wedding. It is horrible for Gulliver to think that the wise horses, who are watching, will conclude that he and the girl are the same species. They already know that.
This has something to do with Swift's "intimate," but eccentric, relationships with a few women.
Apparently, yoga pants were a thing hundreds of years ago.
The date of the release does help explain the de rigueur nude scene, though.
Jacob & Rachel's story is surely about romantic love. Likewise Boaz and Ruth
Both those accounts came many years before Menno Simons. OTOH, not a lot of genetic diversity in those stories.
She was also the Mother of God in Zeferelli's Jesus of Nazareth, so it's appropriate that she passes straight after Christmas. A virgin birth can be rough...
When we saw this in junior high (and we were about 14), we got a little advance warning about the nude scene. "I'm sure all of you will behave like adults."
And then when we saw her breasts we were like, "Woo-hoo!"
And, also, "Tits!"
Seeing R&J with age appropriate actors makes it better. i liked this version, didn't like the Burton/Taylor "Taming of the Shrew". Liz just didn't have the voice for Shakespeare.
A lovely woman. RIP.
Her level headed comments on doing a nude scene in R&J: "We shot it at the end of the film. So by that time...we've become one big family. It wasn't that big of a deal. And Leonard wasn't shy at all! In the middle of shooting I just completely forgot I didn't have clothes on.... "It was needed for the film. Everyone thinks they were so young they didn't realize what they were doing. But we were very aware. We both came from drama schools and when you work you take your work very seriously.
Of course, that reminded me of the Brando Butter babe, who was complaining till the day she died of being "raped By Brando" during a scene of "Last tango in Paris".
A truly beautiful woman on several different dimensions.
I was 17 and went to see it with a beautiful 16-year-old whose jade gate I wanted to enter. The movie that I’d thought would work didn’t until I recited “She Walks in Beauty” and the first verse of Dylan’s “To Ramona,” passing it off as my own.
That movie brought Shakespeare to life for me. I couldn't get past the written Shakespeare. RIP, she done him proud.
Zeffirelli's is easily my favorite film adaptation of the play and I had seen more than one by the time I saw that one some time in the late 1990s- and Hussey as Juliet is mostly the reason why.
Juliet visits Friar Laurence for help, and he offers her a potion that will put her into a deathlike coma or catalepsy for "two and forty hours"
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can this be called assisted suicide/inept deal making
She look the way you want Juliet to look....You know who doesn't look like Juliet: Norma Shearer. She played in 1936 production and beat out all the other wives of studio executives for that coveted role. She was a little too long in the tooth to be playing Juliet and, by movie star standards, she wasn't even that hot. That more than age should be the prime qualification for the Juliet role--although, post Epstein, it would probably be problematic casting a hot thirteen year old in the role......Andy Devine was also in the cast. He played a comic role and was pretty good in it. Andy was the perennial Western sidekick. Even as a sidekick he took second or third place to the more illustrious sidekicks like Walter Brennan and Gabby Hayes. It's a shame he didn't pursue a career in Shakespeare where his true talent lay. He would have been an impressive Polonius or Falstaff, but fate had other plans for him.
Never seen it, and now I'm too old . . .
I guess she was a wonderful person. I always thought of her as a shameless hussy ... you know ... because of her name ...
Helena Bonham-Carter looked like a child in Lady Jane, but she was already 20 (or 19) and had played a more mature character in A Room with a View the year before.
The R&J movie theme song seems ill chosen. It’s beautiful, but who is Russ? I guess they cut that character, for whatever reason
Last year AA did multiple blog posts on the California litigation the 2 leads filed alleging the filming was sex abuse and non-consensual. They lost in part for prior inconsistent statements such as this one.
Jeezus…I thought my comment was going to be riskiest 😳…
I saw the movie a L O N G T I M E A G O , maybe about when it first came out. when I was in my mid-20's. I suppose that now when I imagine my granddaughters in it I'd react differently. But I hope not. Not because I want them to have such experiences at that age, but because I realize that they have lives of their own, and I hope that their elders haven't pushed them into blind alleys.
Which is really what the Tragedy is about.
Depends on which state you're in. I think. Maybe not. Ask a lawyer.
My senior English teacher, Ms Blalock, took her senior classes to see two Shakespear movies in theaters: this "Romeo and Juliet" and the Richard Burton / Elizabeth Taylor "Taming of the Shrew". There was a movie theater in Houston at the time 69/70 that specialized in matinee movies for students. We also watched some 16mm prints in class.
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