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ROME – The Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who captivated his audience from around the world with his romantic vision and often extravagant productions, was captured in his film "Romeo and Juliet", died in Rome at the age of 96 years old.
While Zeffirelli was best known for his films, his name was also inextricably linked to theater and opera. Showing great flexibility, he has produced classics for the world's most famous operas, from the venerable Scala of Milan to the Metropolitan of New York, to the London and Italian scenes.
Zeffirelli's son, Luciano, said his father died at home on Saturday.
"He suffered for a while, but he went away peacefully," he said.
Zeffirelli's mission is to make culture accessible to the masses, often seeking his inspiration in Shakespeare and other great literary writers for his films, and producing operas for the public television audience.
Claiming no favorite, Zeffirelli is a day compared to a sultan with a harem to three: film, theater and opera.
"I am not a director, I am a director who uses different instruments to express his dreams and stories – to make people dream," Zeffirelli told The Associated Press in 2006.
Since being born out of wedlock in the suburbs of Florence on February 12, 1923, Zeffirelli has become one of the most prolific directors in Italy, working with such famous artists as Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and his well loved Maria Callas. Hollywood stars including Elizabeth Taylor, Mel Gibson, Cher and Judi Dench.
Throughout his career, Zeffirelli has taken risks – and his audacity has paid off at the box office. His success in the United States was a rarity among Italian filmmakers, and he was proud to know the tastes of modern moviegoers.
He was one of the few Italian directors close to the Vatican. The church has turned to the theatrical touch of Zeffirelli for live broadcast of the papal installation of 1978 and the opening ceremonies of the holy year 1983 in the Basilica of St. Pierre. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi also invited him to lead some large-scale events.
But Zeffirelli was best known outside of Italy for his colorful romantic films, with soft concentration. Her "Romeo and Juliet" of 1968 brought the story of Shakespeare to a new and grateful generation, and her "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" told the story of Saint Francis in parables with 13th century youth.
"Romeo and Juliet" has had records in the United States, although it was made with two unknown actors, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey. The film, which cost $ 1.5 million, brought in $ 52 million and became the most successful Shakespearean film of all time.
In the 1970s, Zeffirelli's attention shifted from romantic to spiritual. His "Life of Jesus", created on television in 1977, became an instant classic with his representation of a Christ that seemed authentic and relevant. Broadcast around the world, the film has grossed more than $ 300 million.
Where Zeffirelli has worked, however, the controversy has never been so far. In 1978, he threatened to leave Italy permanently because of violent attacks against him and his art by leftist groups in his country, which considered Zeffirelli as a representative of Hollywood.
On the other hand, stung by American critics of his movie "Endless Love" of 1981, played by Brooke Shields, Zeffirelli said he could never shoot another movie in the United States. As he predicted, the film would be a box office success.
In his autobiography of 2006, Zeffirelli described the scandalous circumstances of his birth at the time. He recounted how his mother attended the funeral of her husband, pregnant with a child of another man. Unable to give the baby either the name of her father or of her father, she intended to name him Zeffiretti, after an air of Mozart's "Cosi fan Tutti", but a typo did, making Zeffirelli "unique in the world with Zeffirelli as a name, thanks to the madness of my mother."
His mother died of tuberculosis at the age of 6 and Zeffirelli went to live with his father's cousin, whom he affectionately called Zia (aunt) Lide.
It was during this period of his childhood, living in Zia Lide's house where his father visited every week, that Zeffirelli developed passions that would shape his life. The first was for the opera, after seeing Wagner's "Walkuere" at 8 or 9 years old in Florence. The second was a love of English culture and literature, after his father introduced him three times a week to English classes with a British expatriate living in Florence.
His experiences with the British expatriate community under fascism, and their firm belief that he would be a victim of Benito Mussolini's regime, were at the heart of the 1991 semi-autobiographical film "Tea with Mussolini".
He remained an Anglophile and was particularly proud of the United Kingdom's victory in 2004 as an honorary knight – the only Italian citizen to have received this honor.
In his youth, Zeffirelli served with supporters during the Second World War. He then served as an interpreter for British troops.
A long-time single, he moved from architecture to age 20 when he joined an experimental troupe from his hometown.
After a short acting career, Zeffirelli worked with Luchino Visconti's theater company in Rome, where he demonstrated his talent for dramatic staging techniques in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Troilus". Cressida ". He was then assistant director under the masters of Italian cinema Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio De Sica.
In 1950, he began a long and fruitful association with the lyric theater, working as a director, scenographer and costumer, and giving new life to the works of his favorites: Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi.
Over the next ten years, he has staged dozens of operas, romantic melodramas, and contemporary works in Italian and European theaters, and has finally acquired the reputation of being the best. 39, one of the best directors of musical theater in the world.
The Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York subsequently hosted the classic staging of Zeffirelli's "La Boheme", broadcast nationally on American television in 1982.
Zeffirelli returned to the prose theater in 1961 with an innovative rendition of "Romeo and Juliet" at the Old Vic in London. British critics immediately called it "revolutionary" and the director used it as the basis for many subsequent productions and the 1968 film.
His first film in 1958, a comedy titled "Camping", had limited success. But eight years later, he directed Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" and set himself apart from world cinema.
When Zeffirelli decided to shoot "La Traviata" in the cinema, he had already turned his theatrical version of opera into a classic presented at La Scala in Milan with soprano Maria Callas. He had been preparing the film since 1950, he said.
"In the last 30 years, I've done everything that a lyrical theater artist can do," wrote Zeffirelli in an article for Corriere della Sera, Italy, at the film's release, in which 1983. "This work is the one that crowns all my hopes and gratifies all my ambitions."
The film, starring Teresa Stratas and Placido Domingo, has garnered almost unanimous critical acclaim from both sides of the Atlantic – a rarity for Zeffirelli – and has been nominated for Oscars for costumes, set design and of artistic direction.
Zeffirelli has been working on a new staging of La Traviata, his latest project, which will open the 2019 Opera Festival on June 21 at the Verona Arena. "We will pay him a last tribute with one of his most appreciated operas," said Artistic Director Cecilia Gasdia. "He will be with us."
Zeffirelli often turned his talents to his hometown. In 1983, he wrote a historical portrait of Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which he called "political utopia". During the terrible floods of Florence in 1966, Zeffirelli produced a well-received documentary on the damage done to the city and its art.
"I feel more like a Florentine than an Italian," Zeffirelli said. "Citizen of Florence who was once the capital of Western civilization."
Accused by some of his heaviness in his staging techniques, Zeffirelli has conducted frequent verbal battles with others in the Italian theater.
"Zeffirelli does not realize that an empty scene can be more dramatic than a junk scene," Carmelo Bene, an Italian director and avant-garde actor and diligent critic, said one day. Zeffirelli.
This is a criticism that some people reserve for his sumptuous production "Aida" to open the 2006-2007 season of La Scala – his first return to Milan Opera in a dozen years and the fifth "Aida" of his career . The production was a popular success, but we will remember more the turbulent output of the principal tenor, Roberto Alagna, after being booed from the loggia.
"I'm 83 years old and I've been working really like crazy since I was a kid.I did everything, but I never really felt like I said anything." what I had to say, "Zeffirelli told the Associated Press shortly before the opening of" Aida. "
Zeffirelli had balance problems after contracting a life-threatening infection during a hip operation in 1999, but that did not slow him down. "I always have to stick to this or that way to walk … but the spirit is perfectly intact," he said in an interview with AP.
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