Biography
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. 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. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide