Olivia Hussey, who has died aged 73, found fame as a teenager when she was cast as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in 1968, but although acclaimed a stunning screen presence she never caught the wave that might have swept her to Hollywood stardom.
With her soulful eyes and dark, silky hair framing a perfectly oval face, she was ravishing as Juliet, declared the Telegraph. Zeffirelli was determined to make the film appeal to a young audience, and screen-tested dozens of youthful hopefuls for the two principal roles.
When Zeffirelli showed the final six contenders for each to George Ornstein, Paramount’s European production chief, both men instantly picked Olivia Hussey, then 15, with another unknown teenager, Leonard Whiting, a year older, for Romeo.
Before filming began, Zeffirelli closeted both his fresh-faced new stars at his villa outside Rome. When the famous balcony scene was shot, the American critic Roger Ebert, invited on to the set, noted “the heedless energy that Hussey threw into it, take after take, hurling herself almost off the balcony for hungry kisses.”
“Hussey and Whiting were so good,” Ebert wrote later, “because they didn’t know any better. Another year or two of experience, perhaps, and they would have been too intimidated to play the roles.”
Not everything went to plan. Zeffirelli needed special permission to film his underage Juliet topless and he had to reshoot Hussey’s first appearance in the wedding sequence because, by some accident of lighting or costume, she looked slightly pregnant. But the finished movie was an outstanding success, and was chosen for the Royal Film Performance attended by the Queen and Prince Philip in March 1968. (Olivia Hussey later said she was so nervous that she wet her couture dress.)
Finding herself internationally famous, Olivia Hussey toured the world promoting the film before returning exhausted and spending a year hiding at her mother’s house in Wimbledon, a virtual recluse. “It all happened so fast, I never had the chance to adapt to the fame,” she recalled. “It overwhelmed me, so I just ran away from it.”
As one of the world’s most promising actresses she was offered big parts opposite John Wayne, Richard Burton and other major stars, all of which she turned down. Instead, her big films were few and far between, and included such forgettable pictures as Death on the Nile (1978), a remake of the musical Lost Horizon (1973) and, at nearly 50, an appearance as Norman Bates’s mother in the made-for-television Psycho IV (1999).
Having embraced meditation through the guru Swami Muktananda, she fell out with Bette Davis while filming Death on the Nile when the older star complained about Olivia Hussey playing “East Indian chants” on her dressing-room sound system at 6am. They did not speak for the rest of the shoot.
After Juliet her two most successful appearances were on television, in Zeffirelli’s acclaimed mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977), in which she played Christ’s mother Mary (although she was actually seven years younger than Robert Powell), and the title role in Mother Teresa of Calcutta (2003), also made for TV and shot entirely on location in Sri Lanka and Italy, in which she delivered an earnest, almost reverential, portrayal.
Even then, as a mother of three in her 50s, she was still receiving regular letters from smitten teenage boys who had been shown Romeo and Juliet at school.
She was born Olivia Osuna on April 17 1951 in Buenos Aires, the daughter of Andrés Osuna, an Argentine opera singer, and his wife Joy Hussey, the daughter of Scottish expats, who worked as a secretary. Olivia’s first language was Spanish.
Her father left when she was two, and at the age of seven she moved with her mother and younger brother to London, where Olivia enrolled at Penge primary. From 1962 she attended the Italia Conti Academy drama school.
At 13 she began acting professionally, taking her mother’s maiden name, and was cast as Jenny in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Wyndhams, 1966), opposite Vanessa Redgrave. Zeffirelli saw her and thought she might be right for Juliet: “mature enough with experience and natural beauty… while still looking 14.”
Having chosen Olivia Hussey from some 500 hopefuls, Zeffirelli discovered that his Juliet was something of a wild child with a weakness for good-looking young men – including her co-star Whiting, although she later denied that they had a passionate fling.
After her triumph as Juliet, she was offered the title role in the Boleyn biopic Anne of the Thousand Days opposite Richard Burton and the chance to co-star with John Wayne in True Grit (both 1969) by the Hollywood producer Hal B Wallis.
In her 2018 memoir she recalled that she had “mumbled something about being interested in Anne of the Thousand Days” but added that she “couldn’t see herself with Wayne”.
She later claimed that this “adolescent and opinionated” remark inevitably ended her professional relationship with Wallis, who withdrew his offer on the spot. “It had taken me less than a minute to talk my way out of it” she wrote. The part of Anne Boleyn went instead to the French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold.
Olivia Hussey enjoyed a big following among priests and nuns, who knew her as the Virgin Mary in her second big Zeffirelli production, Jesus of Nazareth, said to have been one of Pope John Paul II’s favourite films.
For her transformation into the dour Mother Teresa, the veteran Hollywood director William Riead hired the Oscar-winning Kevin Haney to create the elaborate make-up. But at 5ft 2in, Olivia Hussey had to stoop to appear five inches shorter, Mother Teresa standing a mere 4ft 7in.
She moved to Los Angeles in 1969, a month after Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family and into the same house on Cielo Drive, owned by her then boyfriend’s manager, where the massacre had taken place.
In 1969, Olivia Hussey won a special David di Donatello Award and a Golden Globe for her performance in Romeo and Juliet. For Mother Teresa of Calcutta, she was presented with a Character and Morality in Entertainment Award in 2007.
Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting reunited on screen in the film Social Suicide (2015), in which her daughter, the actress India Eisley, played their fictional daughter Julia Coulson.
She overcame lifelong agoraphobia but in 2008 was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer. Her memoir, The Girl on the Balcony, appeared in 2018.
Olivia Hussey was four times married, firstly, in 1971, to Dean Paul Martin, son of the American crooner Dean Martin, with whom she had a son. After they divorced in 1978, she was married briefly to the British singer-songwriter Paul Ryan, then in 1980 she married Akira Fuse, known as the “Japanese Frank Sinatra”, and with whom she had another son before they divorced in 1989. Her fourth husband, David Eisley, a former rock singer with the band Dirty White Boy, survives her with their daughter and her sons from her first two marriages.
Olivia Hussey, born April 17 1951, died December 27 2024