Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, the British actors who as teenagers were the stars of Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, have resurrected a lawsuit against Paramount for a famous nude scene in the bedroom.
Now grandparents and over seventy, the two actors had reported the entertainment giant in January 2023 but the case was dismissed last May: nothing in Romeo and Juliet - the judge had ruled - reached the level of child pornography.
This time, the copyright home video company Criterion Collection is involved in the legal action, having distributed the film in the Blu-ray version a year ago.
Olivia and Leonard, who were respectively 15 and 16 years old at the time of filming, claim that the scene in which Zeffirelli unexpectedly asked them to undress 55 years ago constituted a "traumatic event".
In the original lawsuit, the two plaintiffs had asked for half a billion dollars in damages.
Zeffirelli died in 2019. His Romeo and Juliet was a huge success with the public, nominated for four Oscars including best director and best film, and winner of two statuettes for the cinematography by Pasqualino De Santis and the costumes by Danilo Donati.
Hussey is now 72 years old, Whiting one older.
They claim that the director had ensured that they would not have to undress but wear flesh-colored clothes in the scene in question.
Only at the end did the director state that the film "would have failed" if the two protagonists had not been naked in bed.
“Nothing in the original agreement allowed Paramount to recreate their work in any medium other than 35 mm,” reads the new lawsuit, the text of which was obtained by Entertainment Weekly, while the Criterion digital edition uses “frames digitally enhanced" and "in very high definition" of the scene in which both Olivia's breasts and Leonard's bottom are seen naked: "Private parts that were effectively obscured by the low resolution of the original film".
The couple, whose careers never really took off after Romeo and Juliet for which they each won a Golden Globe, told Entertainment Weekly they had thrown "an olive branch" to Paramount in hopes of closing the case without having to get to court.
Having seen their offer rejected, the two therefore turned to the judge again: "The facts are very clear", they argue: "We believe that over half a century of mental imprisonment for this traumatic event was enough".
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