The actors of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet sue Paramount for their nude scene: "They were raped"

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"The emblem of love in the West is the tragedy of

," writes Tamara Tenenbaum in

(Seix Barral).

"No other has been as versioned and reversed as this one and I'm not just talking about explicit adaptations,

."

Read

, read

, and so on.

Among all the versions and reversals of this immortal story published for the first time in 1597, Franco Zeffirelli's version, released in 1968, has been one of the most applauded in history.

Among other things, because Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting have just turned 16 and 17 respectively, the age of Juliet and Romeo.

Only that the uses and customs have changed a lot in six centuries, let alone in the last 50 years: the nudity of minors is no longer tolerated.

Romeo and Juliet

was critically acclaimed with the great Renata Adler calling it "lovable, sensitive and relatable" in the

.

He won a couple of aesthetic Oscars, for Best Costumes and Best Photography, and the young protagonists were awarded Best Promises, Male and Female, at the Golden Globes, where their film was chosen for Best Foreign Language Film.

But Hussey and Whiting were minors and the bed scene in which they appear naked already caused a great scandal.

.

Now that Zeffirelli has died - he died in 2019 -, when the two actors have turned 71 and 72 respectively, they have decided to sue Paramount, the studio that produced the film, for at least 500 million dollars.

As they argue, the prior agreement was that they would not appear authentically nude, but rather in

, but the filmmaker urged them to undress, convincing them that he would film the scene from the right angles so that no intimate part of their bodies would end up being reproduced on film. big screen.

Franco Zeffirelli, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, in 1968.EUSTACHE CÁRDENAS

They also argue that

that has lasted 55 years and that their careers were affected.

We don't know where their lives would have taken without that unwanted nudity, but Hussey has had a remarkable career, including small roles in

.

Leonard Whiting has worked much less.

Both said goodbye to the audience, reuniting for the last time in

, a film by Bruce Webb released in 2015.

Their lawyer, Salomon Gresen, has stated in an interview that "they were very innocent in the 1960s and could not understand what had happened to them. And suddenly they became famous on a level that they could not have imagined, to which added that they had been raped in a way that they did not know how to deal with".

Before the year 2023 arrived -the complaint was filed last Friday in Santa Monica-, they decided to take advantage of a

that ended on December 31.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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