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Mourners pay tribute to Zeffirelli

Italian director died aged 96 at weekend

Redazione Ansa

(ANSA) - Rome, June 17 - Senate Speaker Elisabetta Casellati is one of the mourners set to pay tribute to Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, whose body is being lain in State at Florence's Palazzo Vecchio after his death at the age of 96 at the weekend. Zeffirelli was born in Florence on February 12, 1923, the illegitimate child of a cloth merchant and a dress-maker.
    His mother, who died when he was six, was a pianist and chose the name 'zeffiretti' or 'little breezes' from a Mozart aria but it was misspelled in the birth register as Zeffirelli.
    The director spent his early years in an orphanage, before being adopted by a group of Englishwomen expats living in Florence - experiences that Zeffirelli drew on for his semiautobiographical 1999 film Tea with Mussolini.
    The movie, starring Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith and singing star Cher, is also a condemnation of Italy's Fascist years under dictator Benito Mussolini.
    Zeffirelli started out as an actor, playing on stage in productions directed by the man who was to become his mentor, Luchino Visconti.
    Visconti, a leftist aristocrat, went on to make Zeffirelli his assistant director, using his emerging talents on three films, including his 1954 masterpiece Senso played out against the backdrop of the 1866 Italo-Austrian war. Zeffirelli was to remain deeply influenced by the elder director's work, in particular his trademark attention to detail.
    In the 1950s and 60s, Zeffirelli launched into a career directing, designing and costuming theatre and opera productions.
    He also became a firm friend of opera diva Maria Callas, guiding her through some of her greatest performances. In 1958, he caused a sensation in the US with an unorthodox La Traviata at the Dallas Civic Opera, staged in flashback and starring Callas.
    His first major film was a screen version of Puccini's La Boheme. Although the movie was a critical success, it was his 1967 lusty adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, that caught the attention of the film world.
    Another Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, provided inspiration for his next film, which introduced 15-year-old Olivia Hussey to the screen as Juliet, playing opposite Leonard Whiting's Romeo. The inspired casting turned the Oscar-nominated movie into a youth icon.
    Zeffirelli returned to Shakespeare in 1990, with an all-star version of Hamlet featuring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close, while his 1996 adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre reconfirmed his enduring passion for British themes.
    But it is with opera that Zeffirelli's name has become most closely associated, thanks to lavish screen adaptations such as La Traviata (1982), Turandot (1983), Tosca (1985), Otello (1986) and I Pagliacci (1981), and larger-than-life productions staged in some of the world's most prestigious opera houses, including New York's the Met, Milan's La Scala and London's Convent Garden.
   

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