Director Franco Zeffirelli dies
The Italian filmmaker known for excess in his art and his life was 96.
Italian film, theater and opera director Franco Zeffirelli, known for his over-the-top productions, once described a scene of a father reacting to his son’s desire to work in the theater.
“He just broke everything in sight. Having exhausted the china and glass, he opened a drawer and pulled out a revolver, which he started to wave about. ‘I made you, now I’ll unmake you!’ ”
The scene was not from one of Zeffirelli’s flamboyant movies or operas. It was from his life.
Zeffirelli, 96, whose life, like his productions, was full of grand characters, outsize passions, temperamental rages and torrid love affairs, died Saturday in Rome. “He left in a peaceful way” after a long illness, his son Luciano said.
Zeffirelli is most widely known for his films, including the 1968 critical and box office hit “Romeo and Juliet” and a 1990 “Hamlet” with Mel Gibson, among other Shakespeare adaptations. His non-Bard movies included a remake of “The Champ” (1979), with Jon Voight; “Tea with Mussolini” (1999), set in his beloved Florence; and his last feature film, “Callas Forever” (2002), which paid homage to his tempestuous friend, opera singer Maria Callas.
Some of his films drew mixed reviews at best, but his opera productions — with massive, opulent sets and onstage casts sometimes numbering in the hundreds, not to mention including animals — are almost invariably audience favorites in the opera houses that can afford them worldwide. At America’s premier opera venue, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Zeffirelli’s version of Puccini’s “La Boheme” is the mostoften presented production in the company’s history.
In 1996, Los Angeles Opera presented his popular production of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” featuring crowd scenes that included acrobats, jugglers, fire eaters and a live donkey.
Critics complained that his stage productions were excessive, but for Zeffirelli, excess was just a starting point.
“They must always tell me, ‘Stop, is enough, is excessive,’ ” he told the London Observer in 2003. “But I prefer to go berserk. I will never stop!”
At 83, he created his last major, new opera production, his take on Verdi’s “Aida” that opened the La Scala season in Milan, Italy, in 2006. As usual, Zeffirelli designed the sets and costumes, as well as directed, resulting in an extravaganza that the Telegraph in London described as evoking “the grandeur of ancient Egypt in a riot of golden magnificence.”
On opening night, with Italy’s Prime Minister Romano Prodi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the audience, the applause went on for 15 minutes.
“For me, opera is dreams,” Zeffirelli said, “and when I dream I create my own planet.”
He engaged in high-profile feuds and his famous temper didn’t spare even as august a figure as conductor Arturo Toscanini, who caught Zeffirelli’s rage when he interrupted a rehearsal.
In his autumn years, Zeffirelli railed against the nontraditional stagings of young opera directors.
“They say I’m the greatest director of opera in the world,” he told the Independent in 2003. “I’m not the greatest — I’m the only one.”
Even his birth caused a scandal. Zeffirelli was born Feb. 12, 1923, in the outskirts of Florence. His mother was seamstress and clothes designer Alaide Garosi, and his father was fabric merchant Ottorino Corsi — both of whom were married to others when Zeffirelli was conceived.
In his 1986 autobiography “Zeffirelli,” he wrote that his parents had “a stormy love affair that scandalized the close community that was Florence sixty years ago.”
His mother meant to give
him the name Zeffiretti, meaning “little breezes,” from a Mozart aria, but a clerk misspelled it.
Zeffirelli was 6 when his mother died and he was raised mostly by his aunt. In his second autobiography, published in Italy in 2006 (no English-language version has been published), he revealed he had an early sexual experience with a priest. But Zeffirelli, a lifelong staunch supporter of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy, did not describe the incident as traumatic.
“Molestation suggests violence, and there was no violence at all,” he said in a 2006 Guardian interview.
Although he had several heterosexual affairs beginning when he was 16 — “I was very attractive, very handsome, and a lot of women fell in love with me,” he told the Guardian — his key romantic relationships were with men.
Zeffirelli wrote that he fought on the side of partisans against Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist forces during World War II and was several times in danger. After the war he was planning to become an architect until, in 1945 and back in Florence, he saw the film version of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” directed by and starring Laurence Olivier.
“There was Olivier at the height of his powers and there were the English defending their honor,” he wrote. “I knew then what I was going to do. Architecture was not for me; it had to be the stage.”
He was a lowly 22-yearold assistant scene painter when he met prominent stage and film director Luchino Visconti, and they began a nearly decade-long affair. It was a rocky relationship, but through it Zeffirelli met some of the major stage artists and celebrities of the time, including Callas, Leonard Bernstein, Anna Magnani, Coco Chanel and Tennessee Williams.
And his set designs for productions by Visconti and others brought him notice of his own. His breakout as a director came in 1954 when he was designing sets for a production of Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (“Cinderella”) at La Scala. When the director became ill, Zeffirelli asked for the job and got it.
His completely revamped production was a “syntheses of past and present, combining 18th century costumes with a pale, clearly lit palette,” wrote critic Zachary Woolfe in a 2011 London Observer feature. Although Zeffirelli’s stage works are now seen in many quarters as overburdened, he came onto the scene as an innovator.
His stature grew with further productions, especially a 1957 staging in Dallas of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” starring Callas and done as a flashback.
He triumphed in non-opera theater in London in 1960 with a naturalistic production of “Romeo and Juliet” that starred Judi Dench, then 25, and emphasized the sensuality of the relationship. Although several critics hated its break from tradition — he ordered actors to stress the dramatic nature of Shakespeare’s dialogue rather than its poetry — critic Kenneth Tynan in the Observer hailed it as “a revelation, even perhaps a revolution,” and young theatergoers (and non-theatergoers) lined up for tickets.
“I shot all the films I wanted to, while I went back to opera whenever I felt vulnerable and in need of reassurance,” he said in a 2013 China Daily interview.