Zeffirelli cast Leonard Whiting as Romeo at seventeen for a face and an impatience no adult actor could fake, and the ballroom scene alone justifies the choice. The long speeches were beyond him, and finding a second act turned out to be harder still.
Fi1m perspective
The moment is the Capulet ball. Nino Rota's boy sings his ballad about youth passing, Zeffirelli cuts between two faces across a crowded hall, and Leonard Whiting does almost nothing. He looks at Olivia Hussey as a boy who has forgotten everyone else in the hall, and that is the performance. He does not seem to be acting at all; he is seventeen and looking at someone, and the camera has caught it.
Zeffirelli wanted the lovers at the age Shakespeare wrote them, and Whiting was cast at seventeen, leaving school early in 1967 to do it. The film gets what it paid for. The balcony scene is played as two children whispering so as not to wake the house, and the short lines suit him: he says them as if they were his own. The long ones do not. He rushes the big speeches, and since the screenplay by Zeffirelli, Franco Brusati and Masolino D'Amico has already cut the text hard, what survives has to carry more than a hurrying boy can give it. Most critics have said so since 1968, and they are right. We had seen the play a dozen ways and did not expect the ball to get to us, and it did, because Whiting looks capable of doing something rash, which is the one thing most Romeos cannot manage.
He had been a performer since childhood, a singer first, then the Artful Dodger on the London stage, and Romeo made him known everywhere at once. What followed was thin. Say Hello to Yesterday (1971) put him opposite Jean Simmons in a romantic comedy set over one day in London; Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) gave him Victor Frankenstein in a television film with a large cast. By the mid-1970s he had largely stopped, and he has been plain about why: "It's very hard to know what to do afterwards and what you want to do." He has since worked in theatre, as actor and writer, and came back to the screen for Social Suicide (2015), with Hussey again, forty-six years on.
Zeffirelli cast for something an adult actor cannot fake and a teenager cannot keep. Whiting had it for one film in the Italian sun, and the first hour of Romeo and Juliet is where to see it. Do not expect the second hour, or the rest of the filmography, to hold it as well.
Biography
Leonard Whiting is a British actor born on 30 June 1950 in Wood Green, Middlesex, England. He is best known for playing Romeo in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
Whiting attended St Richard of Chichester School in Camden Town, leaving shortly before his seventeenth birthday to begin work on the film. Earlier, he had performed on stage, including as the Artful Dodger in the London production of the musical Oliver!. The role of Romeo earned him the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor in 1969.
He appeared in several other films during the late 1960s and 1970s, including The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), Say Hello to Yesterday (1970) and Rachel's Man (1975), before largely stepping back from acting.
