by STEVE ROSE
From Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver to Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon, are films that used teen actors for sexual roles heading for a reckoning? As Paramount is sued over Romeo and Juliet, we look at the scenes cinema and TV might want to forget
Spoiler alert: Romeo and Juliet does not have a happy ending. But Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of the Shakespeare play did – at least until recently. The 1968 movie was a huge commercial success and became a secondary school fixture. Its stars, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, even briefly dated – a dream come true publicity-wise. But now it has emerged that the pair are suing the studio, Paramount, for $500m over Zeffirelli’s handling of a scene in which both actors, then 16 and 17, briefly appeared partially naked. According to the complaint, the actors “were told by Mr Zeffirelli that they must act in the nude or the picture will fail”.
As with the music industry, cinema has tended to gloss over such incidents with the “It was a different time” excuse. This could be seen as a concerted effort to keep the lid on what many suspect to be quite a can of worms. Hussey and Whiting’s lawsuit could represent the long-dreaded can-opener.
The movie industry, especially its output in the late 20th century, is now up for reappraisal, and maybe it needs it. What, for example, should we make of Jodie Foster, at the age of 12, portraying a girl forced into sex work in Taxi Driver? Or Jenny Agutter’s naked swim in 1971’s Walkabout, when she was just 16? The scene was filmed with Agutter’s knowledge and consent, and neither Foster nor Agutter has expressed regret or resentment about these roles, but at what age should an actor be considered mature enough to have given that consent? And should they be allowed to change their minds at a later date?
Or how about Nastassja Kinski? When she was 13, German auteur Wim Wenders cast her in 1975’s Wrong Move, in which she appears topless in a sexualised situation (as an adult, Kinski worked with Wenders again in Paris, Texas and Faraway, So Close). Aged 14, she was depicted fully nude in Hammer horror To the Devil a Daughter, co-starring Christopher Lee. At 17, she was in the sex comedy Stay As You Are, in which she played the regularly naked teen lover of Marcello Mastroianni, who was then in his mid-50s (Lolita-style “forbidden” romances seem to come with this territory). In 1997, Kinski said: “If I had had somebody to protect me or if I had felt more secure about myself, I would not have accepted certain things. Nudity things. And inside it was just tearing me apart.”
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