How Old Was Juliet In Romeo And Juliet 1968

You know the story. Playboy dog, feisty cat. You probably went through the same bewildering experience as the rest of us: someone hands you this Romeo and Juliet book, and your brain immediately goes, "Wait a minute… how old were these kids supposed to be?" Then you fall down the rabbit hole of searching the answer to How Old Was Juliet In Romeo And Juliet 1968, and suddenly you're knee-deep in Shakespearian drama — your own, because the answers are a lot more surprising than you'd expect.

Shakespeare wrote Juliet as a mere 13-year-old. Thirteen. That little. It's almost comical how much lip-syncing and feisty-face-acting we associate with people who still argue with their parents about sit dimmers.

But then, in 1968, Italian director Franco Zeffirelli decided to stick to the script. He cast Olivia Hussey, then just 15 years old, to play Juliet. Hussey wasn't thrilled at first; she even told the director she thought she was too old for the role. Legend has it Zeffirelli reassured her with a wink and a prayer that the youngest-lookingt okayso shat okay. History says Hussey's Juliet nailed the blend of childlike innocence and adultgravity; the audience didn't care, Shakespeare did thee that "she was no teenaged tenny.

Let's talk about the hulking Romeo hole in this saga. How does a film feel junior-higher than everything around it? Zeffirelli's choice was not random. The reason he cast Hussey and Leonard Whiting — then just 17 — was that he wanted to bring Shakespeare closer to