Franco Zeffirelli
Revered theatre, opera and film director best known on screen for his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet
FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI, who has died aged 96, was one of the most versatile Italian artists of his generation, an internationally renowned producer and designer in the realms of opera, stage and screen; in later years, he also dabbled in politics, serving as a senator in the Italian parliament during the first administration of Silvio Berlusconi.
He achieved his greatest triumphs in association with women, especially the leading sopranos of his day. He launched the career of Joan Sutherland with a pioneering production of Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden in 1959 and enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Maria Callas in some of the key roles in the repertoire, notably Violetta in La Traviata. One of his last films was a tribute to that partnership entitled Forever Callas (2002), with Fanny Ardant in the title role.
On stage and in the opera house, he was famous for rethinking “old war horses” in new ways. His dynamic 1960 production for the Old Vic of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet emphasised the brawling Capulets and Montagues in a way reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein’s musical variation on the play, West Side Story.
Hitherto, this aspect had been treated as a tedious, if necessary, prologue to the more elevated story of the young lovers. Under Zeffirelli (and Bernstein) it became the very soil from which the confused lovers must break free to survive. It proved a durable approach: Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film of the play with Leonardo Dicaprio and Claire Danes took the same line.
Zeffirelli’s 1998 production of
La Traviata for the Dallas Civic Opera was equally ground-breaking, picturing the entire opera as a flashback recalled by Violetta from her death bed. Among Callas’s memorable interpretations of this great role, it was the one best remembered by those privileged to have seen and heard it.
In the cinema, Zeffirelli never achieved the respect he earned in theatre and opera. Although several of his movies were commercially successful, few were critically acclaimed. His three Shakespeare adaptations – The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Hamlet (1990) – suffered from inappropriately sensational casting (Burton and Taylor in the Shrew,
Mel Gibson as the gloomy Dane, teenyboppers as the lovers of Verona).
A misguided bid to capture the youth market informed his mawkish 1979 remake of The Champ, about a washed-up pugilist’s bid to win his small son’s love, and the execrable slice of soft porn, Endless Love (1981), which he later disowned as having being ruined in the cutting room.
Between the bard and the boppers came cinematically undistinguished
records of prominent singers in great operatic roles – Teresa Stratas, for example, in La Traviata (1982) and Placido Domingo in Othello (1986). Prosaically shot in a manner quite different from his innovative work for the world’s opera houses, they are now only of archival interest.
Hailed for the breadth of his talent, Franco Zeffirelli was what some called a “Renaissance man”, an epithet more than usually apt in his case since his father could trace his origins back to Leonardo da Vinci. His foes, unfairly perhaps, invoked a rather different image – “jack of all trades”.
Franco Zeffirelli was born in Florence on February 12 1923. He was the illegitimate son of Ottorino Corsi, a Florentine textile merchant, and Alaide Garosi, a fashion designer. Both were married, but to others, and divorce was impossible under state law. To assume an adulterous mother’s name would have spelt instant disgrace so he was given a fictitious one. Adopting a phrase from Mozart’s
Idomeneo, his mother, who loved opera, intended calling her son Giancarlo Zeffiretti (“little breeze”). But an inattentive nurse recorded the name as Zeffirelli.
Gianfranco’s mother died when he was six and he was placed in an orphanage from which, three years later, his father was shamed into rescuing him. Franco was reassigned to the care of his aunt, the former soprano Ines Alfani-tellini, and subsequently of his father’s English secretary, from whom he acquired a faultless command of English, which later stood him in good stead in Hollywood.
Zeffirelli was sent to the local art school, graduating in 1941 with a view to studying Architecture at the University of Florence. There, he took part in amateur theatricals, and in 1943 joined the partisans fighting against the Nazis, acting at one time as an interpreter to the Scots Guards.
Inspired by British actors in uniform with whom he served, he was drawn to the theatre, abandoning family plans to steer him towards architecture and heading for Rome. He drifted into acting for radio and theatre. Luchino Visconti, then Italy’s pre-eminent theatrical producer, saw him in a production of Cocteau’s
Les Parents Terribles and hired him to appear in two other works, Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice and an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
He also appeared in Luigi Zampa’s 1947 film L’onorevole Angelina, which prompted the Hollywood studio RKO to offer him a seven-year contract. He turned it down to become an assistant to Visconti, who was then extending his career from theatre into cinema.
Zeffirelli worked with him on his realist films La Terra Trema (1948) and Bellissima (1951) and later on his historical spectacle, Senso (1954). An aristocrat and a Marxist, Visconti was a bundle of contradictions. Zeffirelli named him as the director from whom he learnt most, though none of his own films echoed Visconti’s patrician elegance or his socialist comment.
In the theatre, Zeffirelli was stage designer in 1948 to Salvador Dali’s production of As You Like It, and in 1948-49 to Visconti’s version of
A Streetcar Named Desire. He also designed a stylised Troilus and
Cressida, mounted in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, which led to an invitation to work at La Scala opera house in Milan. There he staged a stream of memorable productions, including L’italiana in Algeri (1952), La Cenerentola (1954) and a stunning L’elisir d’amore (1954-55).
He also achieved fame at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In his productions of Mascagni’s Cavalleria
Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in 1959, he spotted the difference between the ultra-romantic Cav and the earthier Pag, both hitherto regarded as examples of the same realist tradition. So he made Cav painterly, as if any moment in the opera could be frozen into a 19th-century tableau, while Pag throbbed with sensuality, coming as close to overt sexuality as censorship would allow on stage.
Other highly regarded productions for Covent Garden included Rigoletto and Falstaff in 1961, while in the same year he mounted a less well-received L’elisir d’amore for Glyndebourne that was castigated for its “producer’s itch” deflecting attention from the singers, and sometimes from the music.
At his best, however, Zeffirelli was unsurpassed. The production for which he is best remembered is a masterly Tosca, created for Maria Callas’s return to Covent Garden in 1963. It was a definitive production – opulent, realist, filled with dynamic detail – which the Royal Opera House has seen no reason to replace to this day.
Zeffirelli’s theatrical career embraced the first Italian production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1964 and much work at the National Theatre in London. His 1961 Othello for Stratford, however, was accounted a failure, with John Gielgud miscast in the title role amid a surfeit of distracting stage pictures.
Zeffirelli’s films never matched the adrenalin rush of his finest theatrical and operatic work. He was a staunch Catholic who often favoured religious themes in such movies as Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), about St Francis viewed as a hippie, the life of Jesus of Nazareth (1977), and Sparrow (1993), the syrupy tale of a 19th-century nun who abandons love for a life in the convent. But sentimentality was their besetting sin; their sincerity was never in doubt, but the execution smacked of Hollywood piety.
Zeffirelli’s other films included the panned Endless Love (1981), starring Brooke Shields; a banal account of the life of the Young Toscanini (1988), with Brat-packer C Thomas Howell out of his depth as the future maestro; and a miscast version of Jane Eyre (1996). Though Charlotte Gainsbourg made an appealingly gauche heroine, William Hurt’s near-catatonic Mr Rochester failed to convey the charisma that must have drawn her to him.
One of Zeffirelli’s most satisfying pictures was the semi-autobiographical Tea With Mussolini (1998). The story of a young boy, like himself, rescued from an orphanage in Mussolini’s prewar Italy by five fiercely independent grandes dames, it was a nostalgic piece for Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Cher and Lily Tomlin.
Zeffirelli stood for election as a Christian Democrat in 1983 and eventually entered parliament in 1994 as a senator for the Forza Italia party founded by his close friend, the media magnate Silvio Burlusconi.
A right-wing Catholic, he was anti-immigration and anti-abortion but also a champion of animal rights, campaigning against Siena’s famous horse race, the Palio. Not that he could spare much time for political matters: his busy schedule allowed him to attend two per cent of all senatorial debates – an Italian parliamentary record unlikely soon to be capped.
In 2004 he was awarded an honorary knighthood. In later life Zeffirelli came out as a homosexual, although he remained discreet about his private life. He adopted two adult sons with whom he had worked and who went on to manage his affairs.
Franco Zeffirelli, born February 12 1923, died June 15 2019