Legendary Italian director Franco Zeffirelli dies aged 96 - CNN

Legendary Italian theater, opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli died on Saturday at the age of 96, a spokeswoman for his foundation in Rome told CNN.

Zeffirelli, whose prolific work in the second half of the 20th century established him as one of the country's most cherished creative figures, had been debilitated by pnuemonia he contracted around two weeks ago and had failed to recover, Loretta Formicone said.

His 1968 adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet" earned him an Oscar nomination, while his film "The Taming of the Shrew," made the previous year and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, endures as one of the 20th century's most celebrated retellings of a Shakespearean comedy.

Zeffirelli's work in opera was equally esteemed; the operatic films "La Traviata" and "Otello" are regarded as classics of the genre, and the director staged shows in many of the world's most prestigious opera houses during a lengthy career.

"Jesus of Nazareth," a pioneering British television miniseries, further cemented his status as a leading artistic figure of recent decades. His prominent role in Italy continued while he served as a senator in Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.

"Ciao Maestro," a message on the website for his Franco Zeffirelli Foundation read, after local media reported his death.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/franco-zeffirelli-dies-obit-intl/index.html

2019-06-15 12:28:55Z
52780315041934

Franco Zeffirelli, Italian Director With Taste for Excess, Dies at 96 - The New York Times

Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director renowned for his extravagantly romantic opera productions, popular film versions of Shakespeare and supercharged social life, died on Saturday at his home in Rome. He was 96.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Franco Zeffirelli Foundation in Florence.

Critics sometimes reproached Mr. Zeffirelli’s opera stagings for a flamboyant glamour more typical of Hollywood’s golden era, while Hollywood sometimes disparaged his films as too highbrow. But his success with audiences was undeniable.

Beginning with his 1964 staging of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” his productions drew consistently large audiences to the Metropolitan Opera in New York over the next 40 years. His staging with Maria Callas of Verdi’s “La Traviata” in Dallas in 1958 and Giacomo Puccini’s “Tosca” at Covent Garden in London in 1962 “remain touchstones for opera aficionados and Callas cultists,” Brooks Peters wrote in a profile of Mr. Zeffirelli in Opera News in 2002.

Mr. Zeffirelli’s filming of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” starring the teenage Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, thrilled millions of young viewers who had been untouched by the bard. “I’ve made my career without the support of the critics, thank God,” he told Opera News.

Even for the hyperbolic world of opera, his sets and costumes could seem overdone. In Bizet’s “Carmen,” he populated the stage with horses and donkeys. The headdress he designed for the imperious princess in Puccini’s “Turandot” appeared to be on the verge of collapsing under its own weight. Mr. Zeffirelli’s 1998 revamping of “La Traviata” was savaged by the critics for its overwhelming décor.

“His new look at Verdi’s masterpiece remains waiting and ready for a cast strong enough in personality to compete with its director’s illusions of grandeur,” Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times. Nonetheless, performances of the opera sold out.

Some divas adored Mr. Zeffirelli despite his reputation for focusing too much on the staging. The mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves recounted how he helped her create an interpretation of the headstrong gypsy in his 1996 production of “Carmen” that was hailed for years to come.

Mr. Zeffirelli convinced Ms. Graves that unlike the conventional view of Carmen as a carefree, liberated woman, she in fact lacked confidence and feared losing her freedom by falling in love.

“I had never thought of it that way,” Ms. Graves told The Times in 2002. “It began to open a window in my mind that I didn’t know existed. From that moment on I had to relearn and rethink everything. I felt that I had no idea who Carmen was. It changed my singing completely. And that was just in the first five minutes.”

A whirlwind of energy, Mr. Zeffirelli found time not only to direct operas, films and plays past the age of 80, but also to carry out an intense social life and even pursue a controversial political career. He had a long, tumultuous love affair with Luchino Visconti, the legendary director of film, theater and opera. He was a friend and confidant of Callas, Anna Magnani, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Coco Chanel and Leonard Bernstein.

Twice elected to the Italian Parliament, Mr. Zeffirelli was an ultraconservative senator, particularly on the issue of abortion. In a 1996 New Yorker article, he declared that he would “impose the death penalty on women who had abortions.” He said his extreme views on the subject were colored by the fact that he himself was born out of wedlock despite pressure brought to bear on his mother to terminate her pregnancy.

Franco Zeffirelli was born in Florence on Feb. 12, 1923, a product of an extramarital affair. His father, Ottorino Corsi, was a respected wool and silk merchant but inveterate womanizer, and his mother, Alaide Garosi, was a fashion designer who owned a dressmaking shop. Both were married to others at the time.

By one oft-told account Mr. Zeffirelli was named by his mother. In those days in Italy children of purportedly “unknown” fathers were assigned surnames starting with a different letter each year. He was born in the year of Z. His mother chose Zeffiretti, drawing on a word, meaning little breezes, heard in an aria in Mozart’s opera “Cosi fan tutti.” A transcription error, however, rendered it Zeffirelli. One problem with the story is that “zeffiretti” does not appear in the libretto. “Aurette,” breezes, does.

He knew his father only “in flashes,” he told The Times in 2009.

“I remember this gentleman came, especially at night,” he said. “I woke up and saw this shadowy man naked in bed with my mother.”

By one account his mother placed him with a peasant family, then took him in herself two years later, after her husband died. After she died of tuberculosis a few years later, he was sent to live with a cousin of his father’s.

He went to school in Florence, at the venerable Accademia di Belle Arti. One of his earliest memories was emerging from school at the end of classes and being accosted in the street by his father’s wife. “Bastardino, little bastard, you little bastard!” the woman screamed, Mr. Zeffirelli recalled in a 1986 autobiography.

He was taken to his first opera by an uncle at age 8 and was so smitten by stage design that while his friends played games after school, he buried himself in his cardboard scenes for Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungs.”

His interest in Shakespeare was awakened by an older British woman, Mary O’Neill, who tutored him in English as a child and imbued him with ethical values that foiled the Fascist curriculum served up at school.

“She kept injecting in me the cult of freedom of democracy that remained in my DNA for the rest of my life,” Mr. Zeffirelli told Opera News.

She and her expatriate friends in Florence became the subjects of “Tea With Mussolini” (1999), his acclaimed autobiographical film starring Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench.

He went on to study architecture at the University of Florence, until the onset of World War II interrupted his education. He joined Communist partisan forces, first fighting Mussolini’s Fascists and then the occupying Nazis. Captured by the Fascists, he was saved from the firing squad when his interrogator miraculously turned out to be a half brother whom he had never known. The half brother arranged his release.

After the war he resumed his architecture studies at the university, but theater remained his abiding interest. In the late 1940s, the director Luchino Visconti spotted Mr. Zeffirelli, blond and blue-eyed, working as a stagehand in Florence.

“I begged him, I showed to him my designs as a set designer, that was my dream,” Mr. Zeffirelli said.

A smitten Mr. Visconti gave him his big break in 1949, making him his personal assistant and set designer for his production of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the first staging of the play in Italy.

The two became romantically involved and lived together for three years. In his autobiography, published in 2006, Mr. Zeffirelli wrote that he considered himself “homosexual,” disliking the term “gay” as inelegant.

For years, Mr. Zeffirelli was responsible for Visconti sets and costumes. “Luchino showed me the world of creativity in theater and films, how to conceive an idea and how to bring together a whole world of culture that could embody it,” Mr. Zeffirelli wrote in his autobiography. “In other words, how to direct.”

But Mr. Visconti sought to undermine his protégé’s attempts to strike out on his own. Directing his first play, a revival of Carlo Bertolazzi’s “Lulu” in Rome in the 1940s, Mr. Zeffirelli was appalled to discover Mr. Visconti in the audience leading a chorus of jeers. The incident, Mr. Zeffirelli wrote, was part of the long, painful break between the two men.

Several years ago, Mr. Zeffirelli adopted two adult sons — Giuseppe (known as Pippo) and Luciano — men he had known and worked with for years. They helped manage his affairs, and survive him.

“I missed my father when I was a child, I craved becoming a father myself,” he told The Times in 2009. “But the facts of life prevented me from doing it.”

Within a few years of the “Lulu” revival in Rome, Mr. Zeffirelli had established himself as an inspired director of operas and plays on the world’s leading stages. In 1959, in London, he directed the then little known Joan Sutherland in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” getting her “to make sense of the Mad Scene,” wrote the composer Ned Rorem in a 1996 Times article, “by cupping her hand to her ear, heeding her alter ego as echoed by the schizophrenic flute.”

In 1960, at London’s Old Vic, Mr. Zeffirelli directed a very young Judi Dench in a celebrated “Romeo and Juliet.” But it was the film version, released in the United States in 1968, that achieved superstar status for Mr. Zeffirelli. Costing a mere $1.5 million, the film grossed more than $50 million.

“From Bronx to Bali, Shakespeare was a box-office hit,” wrote Mr. Zeffirelli.

Also extremely popular were his film adaptations of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967) with Ms. Taylor and Mr. Burton, and “Hamlet” (1990) starring Mel Gibson.

Mr. Zeffirelli scored further successes with film versions of operas, including “La Traviata” (1982), starring Teresa Stratas, and “Otello” (1986), with Plácido Domingo. His “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” (1973), depicting the life of St. Francis, and the television mini-series “Jesus of Nazareth” (1977) also drew huge worldwide audiences, if not always critical acclaim.

Mr. Zeffirelli did suffer a few memorable disasters. His 1963 directorial debut on Broadway — a production of Alexandre Dumas’s “The Lady of the Camellias,” starring Susan Strasberg — closed after four evenings. His production of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” a world premiere which inaugurated the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966, “entered the annals of famous flops,” the Times critic Anthony Tommasini wrote in 2003.

And in his memoir, Mr. Zeffirelli conceded that his misdirected 1981 film, “Endless Love,” starring the teenage Brooke Shields, would long be remembered as the butt of Bette Midler’s classic Oscar-night joke that year: “That endless bore.”

But these setbacks could not obscure Mr. Zeffirelli’s very considerable triumphs. When asked in 2002 why Mr. Zeffirelli’s production of Falstaff had endured at the Metropolitan Opera for almost four decades, Joseph Volpe, the Met’s general manager, replied:

“Now, it may be said by those great minds in the opera world, ‘Can’t the Met do any better than this?’ My answer is: ‘We don’t want to do better than this. As far as I’m concerned, this is the best.’ ”

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/arts/music/franco-zeffirelli-dead.html

2019-06-15 12:15:24Z
52780315041934

Franco Zeffirelli Dead: 'Romeo and Juliet' Director Was 96 - Hollywood Reporter

The Italian legend was famous for his opulent Shakespeare adaptations and staging of lavish operas with Maria Callas and others.

Franco Zeffirelli, whose opulent set designs and sweeping directorial style bolstered operatic films, religious epics and Shakespearean love stories, has died. He was 96.

The Italian legend, who was nominated for an Academy Award for directing his innovative version of Romeo and Juliet (1968), died Saturday at his residence in Rome "without suffering," his son Pippo told The Hollywood Reporter. 

Romeo and Juliet, which starred then-unknown teenagers Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, also received a best picture nomination and garnered Academy Awards for cinematography and costume design, indicative of Zeffirelli's visual emphasis (he also penned the screenplay).

The film introduced a new generation to Shakespearean tragedy, created notoriety at the time for showing Hussey topless and was a big hit for Paramount when the studio was in dire need of one.

A year earlier, Zeffirelli wrote and directed an adaptation of another Shakespeare classic, The Taming of the Shrew, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the peak of their careers. And in 1990, he helmed a well-received Hamlet, toplined by Mel Gibson, then known as an action hero, and Glenn Close.

On the casting of Gibson, Zeffirelli once said, "He gave a magnificent performance [in the first Lethal Weapon]," he said. "I thought, 'That's it. He is attractive, he is naughty, he is dangerous.' "

Zeffirelli staged opera in an epic style and drenched movies in the pathos of opera. His works were unabashedly sweeping extravaganzas that were popular with tourists and moneymakers for such auspicious venues as the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

His lavish romantic style was, at times, overly saccharine, as seen with The Champ (1979), the boxing-movie remake starring Jon Voight, Faye Dunaway and Ricky Schroder, and Endless Love (1981), which starred a young Brooke Shields (and, in his film debut, Tom Cruise). Zeffirelli's first cut on the latter received an X rating.

His religious epics were traditional and blessed by the Vatican. In 1972, he directed Brother Sun, Sister Moon, about the life of St. Francis of Assisi, and five years later helmed the international miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (with Hussey playing the Virgin Mary).

His other directorial turns included the operatic La Traviata (1982) and Otello (1986), both starring the Spanish tenor Placido Domingo. For La Traviata, he earned another Oscar nom for art direction-set decoration.                                       

Since his work on Verdi's Falstaff in 1964 under the musical direction of Leonard Bernstein, Zeffirelli directed other operas including Tosca and Norma (both starring Maria Callas), Anthony and Cleopatra, Pagliacci and La Traviata.

His direction of La Boheme in 1981 with Teresa Stratas and Jose Carreras was one of the most extravagant productions in the history of the Met (he led about a dozen productions for the famed opera house). For that opus, Zeffirelli created all the ornate, lavish sets.

He received five David di Donatello Awards from his native country during the course of his career.

He was born in Florence, Tuscany, on Feb. 12, 1923, the product of an affair his mother had with a cloth salesman. His mom wanted his last name to be Zeffiretti — after the title of an aria in Mozart's opera Idomeneo, the word means "little breezes" — but an error in transcription dashed that. She died when he was just 6.

Educated at the Academia di Belle Arti in Florence, Zeffirelli first studied architecture, but after seeing Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), he decided to make a career in theater. He won acclaim as an actor, hailed as the Italian Montgomery Clift.

In 1945, Zeffirelli began work as a set designer at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence. While there, he met director Luchino Visconti, who was to become his mentor and communicated to Zeffirelli his passion for opera.

For much of the 1950s and '60s, Zeffirelli concentrated on theater and opera, designing costumes and sets and directing. He helmed a wide range of productions from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams. His ornate works were largely popular successes staged in Europe's leading venues — the Old Vic, the National and the Comedie-Francaise.

In 1970, at the Pope's request, Zeffirelli staged "Missa solemnis" in honor of the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's birth.

At the Old Vic in 1960, he staged Romeo and Juliet, starring an unknown Judi Dench. It was real, raw and energetic. “I went back to blood, heat and Shakespeare, who wrote about a violent, riotous society full of love and tears,” he told the Times of London.

Young Toscanini, his 1988 biopic of conductor Arturo Toscanini starring C. Thomas Howell, was determined to be unreleaseable in the U.S.

Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/franco-zeffirelli-dead-romeo-juliet-920639

2019-06-15 12:01:03Z
52780315041934

Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli dies at 96 - BBC News

Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli has died aged 96, Italian media report.

The Florence native directed stars including Elizabeth Taylor in the 1967 film Taming of the Shrew and Dame Judi Dench on stage in Romeo and Juliet.

Italian media said Zeffirelli died after a long illness which had grown worse in recent months.

The two-time Oscar nominee also served in the Italian senate for two terms as a member of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.

He is perhaps best known to many as the director of the 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet – starring a then-unknown Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey.

It was viewed by generations of school students studying the Shakespearean drama.

The illegitimate son of a merchant, his mother gave him the surname "Zeffiretti" – meaning "little breezes" – which was misspelled on his birth certificate.

The original meaning came from a Mozart opera – and Zeffirelli would go on to become a prolific creator of opera himself, staging more than 120 in his career.

• Obituary: Franco Zeffirelli
• Listen to Zeffirelli's appearance on Desert Island Discs

"Franco Zeffirelli, one of the world's greatest men of culture, passed away this morning," tweeted Dario Nardella, mayor of Florence. "Goodbye dear Maestro, Florence will never forget you."

Zeffirelli initially studied architecture, but said that after seeing Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), he was inspired to make a career in theatre.

In 1945, he started work as a set designer at Florence's Teatro della Pergola, and concentrated on theatre throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

At the Pope's request, in 1970 Zeffirelli staged "Missa solemnis" in honour of the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's birth.

His first film was a Shakespeare adaptation, of The Taming of the Shrew. While initially intended to star two Italian actors, but was heavily funded by Hollywood couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – who eventually assumed the two leading roles.

Another notable adaptation of the bard's plays would come in 1990s Hamlet – starring Mel Gibson in the title role, with Glenn Close and Helena Bonham Carter among the supporting cast.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48648278

2019-06-15 11:47:14Z
52780315041934

Rob Kardashian to Block Dream from Appearing on Blac Chyna's Reality Show - TMZ

Rob Kardashian You're Dreaming Blac Chyna If You Think Dream's Goin' on Your Show

6/15/2019 1:00 AM PDT

EXCLUSIVE

Rob Kardashian's pumping the brakes on his 2-year-old daughter becoming a big TV star ... or at the very least he's making sure it doesn't happen on Blac Chyna's new reality show.

Rob's lawyer, legal pit bull Marty Singer, fired off a threatening letter to Chyna, telling her their daughter, 2-year-old Dream, CANNOT appear on her show, "The Real Blac Chyna," without Rob's consent, and he will NOT give consent.

As we reported, Rob and Chyna share 50/50 joint custody, and Singer says there's no way Dream's mother can turn a TV camera on Dream without Rob being on board.

According to the letter, Chyna sent Rob an appearance release for Dream to appear on the series, and he's not gonna sign.

We're told Rob has several reasons for withholding consent. He's seen all the drama with Chyna ... most recently, getting into a crazy fight with her former hairdresser while Dream was in the house and an explosive fight with her mom. We're told Rob feels her life is way too tumultuous and a reality show would just exacerbate the situation.

Beyond that, Rob's had his own experience with reality shows, and for the most part, the experience wasn't good. He doesn't want his daughter subjected to the long hours, the lights and the drama. 

The letter ends with a threat to the network that's airing the show ... "Should The Zeus Network proceed with releasing any episodes of the Series or related materials containing Dream's likeness, it will be acting at its own peril and exposing itself to significant liability."

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.tmz.com/2019/06/15/rob-kardashian-rejects-blac-chyna-dream-reality-show-release/

2019-06-15 08:00:00Z
CAIiEPF_eqOPI8gQNTCtkb7VnwgqFQgEKgwIACoFCAowwGUwkAMwgO7lBQ

Netflix’s Murder Mystery: Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston are a lot of fun - Vox.com

Every week, new original films debut on Netflix and other streaming services, often to much less fanfare than their big-screen counterparts. Cinemastream is Vox’s series highlighting the most notable of these premieres, in an ongoing effort to keep interesting and easily accessible new films on your radar.

The premise: To celebrate their 15th anniversary, New York detective Nick (Adam Sandler) and his wife Audrey (Jennifer Aniston) head to Europe. On the plane, they meet a mysterious and handsome stranger, Charles Cavendish (Luke Evans), and accept an invitation to stay on Charles’s family’s yacht for the weekend, where a group of his relatives and friends have gathered. But soon, someone turns up dead — and Nick and Audrey decide to take it upon themselves to figure out whodunit.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

What it’s about: Murder Mystery is part of Adam Sandler’s ongoing lucrative partnership with Netflix, which thus far has produced mostly rough and forgettable comedies (what do you remember about 2015’s The Ridiculous 6, or 2017’s Sandy Wexler?). So the bar is fairly low for Murder Mystery.

Happily, the film clears that low bar with some room to spare. Murder Mystery, oddly enough, has a screenplay penned by James Vanderbilt, best known for writing Zodiac. It’s a self-conscious (and at times explicit) homage to Agatha Christie’s mysteries, which probably helps explains Sandler’s mustache, though he’s no Hercule Poirot. The yacht party attendees include not just Audrey, Nick, and Charles but a bevy of familiar types for a mystery like this: the family patriarch and his much younger fiancée (who may or may not have her eyes on his wealth); the socialite; the spurned son; the foreign dignitary; the world-class athlete who seems to not speak English; the stolid bodyguard; and so on and so forth.

But Murder Mystery is also a comedy about romance and marriage, and about a couple who’s seeking adventure, trying to recapture a spark that hasn’t gone out but is certainly dimmer than it used to be. There’s been a bevy of these comedies released in the past decade or so, some of them better than this one (2018’s Game Night springs to mind, or 2010’s Date Night). It starts out very clunky, with a scene that feels ripped straight from a rom-com made decades ago, as women complain about their husbands and the general helplessness of men while sitting in a hair salon. And though it gets a little more limpid once Sandler and Aniston start sharing the screen, it’s still formulaic.

But it’s helped along by the comic pairing of the two leads, whose sensibilities seem to balance one another well. (The pair are longtime friends and last teamed up for the 2011 film Just Go With It.) Aniston’s pitch-perfect timing and Sandler’s schlubby bull-in-a-china-shop schtick make them a convincingly loving couple and an energetic comedic pair as they romp a bit haplessly around Europe.

Murder Mystery does feel like a very specific sort of direct-to-Netflix offering, designed to ape other movies you’ve already seen and enjoyed without straying too far from the formula or doing anything particularly innovative. But it does so cleverly enough to make watching it a pleasure; it’s just the kind of movie to pop on one night when you’re looking for something fun, silly, and a little mysterious.

Critical reception: Murder Mystery has a score of 40 on Metacritic. In his review at the Guardian, Benjamin Lee writes that the film is “a surprisingly nimble summer comedy that finds both Aniston and Sandler at their most charming.”

Where to watch: Murder Mystery is streaming on Netflix.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/14/18677530/murder-mystery-netflix-review-jennifer-aniston-adam-sandler

2019-06-14 14:10:00Z
CAIiEBYMhRC3k8N6GM1BnlS0Qy8qFwgEKg8IACoHCAowlOzSATCaiDUwo9dy

Farewell, Jessica Jones: the last woman standing in the Marvel-Netflix era - The Guardian

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Farewell, Jessica Jones: the last woman standing in the Marvel-Netflix era  The Guardian

With Marvel's owner, Disney, preparing its own streaming *service*, Netflix is throwing in the towel. But Krysten Ritter's street-level superhero always knew how to ...

View full coverage on Google News
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/14/jessica-jones-netflix-marvel-season-three

2019-06-14 13:17:00Z
CAIiEMtb9dwLj3YXR7nq5fhjEBUqFggEKg4IACoGCAowl6p7MN-zCTCOvRU