Olivia Hussey: Not Just Juliet

Olivia Hussey (1951-2024) would be turning 74 today; we lost her back in December.

We tend to think of this actress in only one role because she was so iconic in it, but she actually had a terrific career across the decades, though not at the level of stardom one might have predicted. The iconic role was of course Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s definitive 1968 Romeo and Juliet. Some of the greatest actresses of all time had played the part over the centuries, but the beautiful, teenaged, half-Argentinian Hussey WAS Juliet. She embodied one’s idea of the role. She has to have been one of the few to have played the part in a major production who was actually the appropriate age. Furthermore, she’d had years of dramatic training at the Italia Conti Academy and had previously played some parts in film and television and the British stage in addition to modeling, so she actually had the acting chops to handle it. That her name was “Hussey” only seemed to reinforce the symbolic rightness. (It was actually her mom’s surname. Her actual last name was Osuna).

The movie was a major hit, as we wrote in our Zeffirelli post, and Hussey was in demand as a result. The lore is that she (being a teenager) squandered opportunities to take great roles offered to her by producer Hal B. Wallis, the lead in Anne of a Thousand Days (which would have been perfect) and the co-starring part in True Grit (the Kim Darby role). As a result, it was years before she got her next movie parts and they were in minor and forgettable films: All the Right Noises (1971), H-Bomb (1971), and The Summertime Killer (1972), followed by epic klinker Lost Horizon (1973). At the same time her personal life was a wreck. She dated Christopher Jones, who is reported to have grossly mistreated her. Then she was involved with Terry Melcher at around the same time his house was the site of the Manson Family murders. Finally she married Dean Paul Martin, Dean Martin’s son, with whom she remained hitched for seven years.

By the mid ’70s her career sorted itself out, and there was a relatively appropriate return to form. She was final girl in Bob Clark’s slasher classic Black Christmas(1974), and had good roles in Death on the Nile (1978) and The Cat and the Canary (1978). With Zeffirelli’s tv mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977), in which she played Mary, she got a foothold in the medium on which she dined for years in an impressive run of quality mini-series and made-for-tv movies, including The Bastard (1978), The Pirate (1978), The Thirteenth Day: The Story of Esther (1979), Ivanhoe (1982), The Last Days of Pompeii (1984), The Corsican Brothers (1985), Stephen King’s It (1990), and Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), which, okay, not so classic, but she got to play Norman Bates’ mother. She also guest starred in things like Lonesome Dove: The Series and Murder She Wrote. In 2003 she played the title role in Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

There were some more cheesy horror films and murder mysteries in there, and she did voice-overs for animated series and video games as well. Her final role was a fitting cap to her career. Social Suicide (2015) was inspired by Romeo and Juliet, and reunited her with her Romeo, Leonard Whiting. In her later years, she and Whiting took legal action against Zeffirelli for some of the inappropriate sexual things they had been expected to engage in as underaged actors in R & J. The case was eventually dismissed in 2023. Breast cancer finally took her life a few months later.