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A child-abuse lawsuit over a nude scene filed by actors who played star-crossed lovers in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 “Romeo and Juliet” will be thrown out, a California judge said Thursday, May 25.
Olivia Hussey was 15 and Leonard Whiting 16 when they starred in the Oscar-winning film of William Shakespeare’s tragedy from Hollywood studio Paramount Pictures.
The film featured a brief bedroom scene in which Whiting’s buttocks and Hussey’s bare breasts were visible, and the actors—now both in their 70s—claimed in a lawsuit filed in December that the movie amounted to sexual exploitation.
But a judge Thursday granted Paramount’s motion to throw out the suit, rejecting the actors’ argument that the scene amounted to “child pornography” and noting that the award-winning film was covered under freedom of speech protections.
“Plaintiffs have not put forth any authority showing the film here can be deemed to be sufficiently sexually suggestive as a matter of law to be held to be conclusively illegal,” wrote Judge Alison Mackenzie, according to Variety.
