(17 April 1951 – 27 December 2024)
Olivia Hussey, the British actress best known for playing Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), has died at 73 after battling breast cancer. She was 16 when Zeffirelli cast her, believing she could pass for the 14-year-old Juliet. Hussey was selected from a list of 500 actresses to star opposite Leonard Whiting, who was one year older. The film was a major success, earning Golden Globe awards for Hussey and Whiting, and the Italian David di Donatello Golden Plate awards for best film and director. It was also nominated best picture at the 41st Oscars, the last Shakesperean adaptation so honoured.
Born Olivia Osuna in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to the tango singer Andres Osuna and the English legal secretary Joy Hussey, she moved to England at the age of seven. Hussey trained at the Italia Conti Academy and began her career in television and film in the early 1960s, including Delmer Daves’ The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1965) with Maureen O’Hara and Rossano Brazzi. She also appeared in the children’s film Cup Fever (1966), featuring a young Susan George and famous footballers like Denis Law, Bobby Charlton, Nobby Stiles and George Best.
Hussey continued to build her career in films such as All the Right Noises (1971), The Summertime Killer, and the ill-fated musical Lost Horizon (1973), a remake of Frank Capra’s 1937 version about the discovery of Shangri-La. She starred in the Canadian horror movie Black Christmas (1974) and encountered more murder in Death on the Nile (1978), both of which did well. She also worked with Zeffirelli again in his 1977 TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, portraying Mary, mother of Jesus.
Her television career flourished with notable roles in The Thirteenth Day (1976), Ivanhoe (1982), The Last Days of Pompeii (1984), It (1990), Lonesome Dove (1994), and took the title role in Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 2003. She had quite a busy career but the material was not always top quality. Her final film appearance was in Social Suicide (2015), a psychological thriller loosely inspired by Romeo and Juliet and starring her own daughter India Eisley as ‘Julia’ and Leonard Whiting as her husband.
Despite her successful career, Hussey faced personal struggles, including agoraphobia. She was briefly romantically linked to Leonard Whiting and Christopher Jones before marrying Dean Paul Martin, son of Dean Martin, in 1971. They had a son, Alexander, before divorcing in 1978. Martin tragically died in a plane crash in 1987. Hussey then married the Japanese singer Akira Fuse, with whom she had a son, Maximillian, before their divorce in 1989. In 1991, she married the musician David Glen Eisley and had a daughter, India. In 2018, she published her memoir The Girl on the Balcony: Olivia Hussey Finds Life After Romeo and Juliet.
MICHAEL DARVELL
