Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli dies at 96 (bbc.co.uk).
.jpg "Franco Zeffirelli, image: Alexey Yushenkov, CC BY-SA 3.0")
The Florence native directed stars including Elizabeth Taylor in the 1967 film Taming of the Shrew and Dame Judi Dench on stage in Romeo and Juliet.
But best known as director of the 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet viewed by generations of school students studying the Shakespearean drama, and also directing the acclaimed Jesus of Nazareth British-Italian mini-series with an all star cast including Robert Powell in the titular role in 1977. His education interrupted by the outbreak of World War II in which he fought for Communist partisan forces, the two-time Oscar nominee also served in the Italian senate for two terms as a member of Italy’s disgraced perpetual powerbroker Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right populist Forza Italia party.
Franco Zeffirelli was a master charmer—no wonder we all fell for his Romeo and Juliet (theguardian.com).
And his eccentricity inspiring a high-minded flamboyant thespianism representation for a Generation X audience:
As a gay man of a certain age, generation and temperament, Zeffirelli did not care to leave the closet in any official sense—though he hardly concealed his extravagant, perhaps even coercive, infatuations with younger men (which became the subject of some later controversy). Without realising it, Zeffirelli in fact helped to inspire Withnail & I. When its writer-director Bruce Robinson was a handsome young actor, he played Benvolio in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and the director’s octopus-handed personal attentions were reportedly transformed and Anglicised into Uncle Monty.
#RIPFrancoZeffirelli (Instagram).
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