When @lilapearlshaps asked Olivia Hussey how she felt about the nude scene in “Romeo and Juliet” today, she took a tiny sip of water. “I’m getting hot, thinking of it. It’s ridiculous,” she said. She recalled the words director Franco Zeffirelli had used to pressure her into taking off her clothes: “We want young people to love it 50 years from now when we’re all dead or old. And what do young people love? They love passion. They love youth. Naked bodies.” “Things which I understand as a person that understands art,” she continued. She’d never been in bed with a boy before or naked in front of one, and she was terrified. “But when you’re acting, you always pretend everything is fine,” she said. After she finished shooting that day, she went into her dressing room and locked the door. She thought about what her devout Catholic mother would say. “I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I started to cry, and I cried and I cried. I cried for a good 15 minutes,” she said. “Everything I felt came out then.” Tap the link in bio for the full reporting on Hussey and Leonard Whiting’s lawsuit against Paramount Pictures.
Photos: Inc./Alamy, ZUMA Press