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Director, writer, scene designer and onetime actor, Franco Zeffirelli talks and acts like a mountebank, but he is a man of considerable talent and great versatility. "I am," he declares grandly, "the flag-bearer of the crusade against boredom, bad taste and stupidity in the theater."
That crusade originated in Florence, where Zeffirelli was born 44 years ago. The illegitimate son of a textile salesman and a seamstress, he grew up, he recalls, "amongst dresses and dressmakers." At nine, he was taken to see Wagner's Walküre—and got lost onstage after the performance. In a sense, he has been swallowed up in scenery ever since his one-man student production at the University of Florence led Luchino Visconti to sign him for a bit part in Crime and Punishment. Zeffirelli then talked his way into assistant directorships with the maestros of postwar Italian cinema: Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini.
Zeffirelli's reputation was established at La Scala in Milan, where in 1954 he designed the costumes and sets for, and staged a production of Rossini's La Cenerentola. It was the beginning of the Zeffirelli style—the flamboyant baroque settings, the epic brio that could turn a war horse into a steeplechaser. Although triumphant in opera, he has been somewhat less successful on the dramatic stage. His incoherent Othello was throttled by reviewers at Stratford-on-Avon. After seeing Zeffirelli's Broadway production of The Lady of the Camellias, TIME's critic called him "a director who needs a director." Even the movie of Romeo and Juliet will not please everybody, since it clearly reflects Zeffirelli's idiosyncratic opinions of Shakespeare. "Mercutio," he insists, "is a self-portrait of Shakespeare himself, and a homosexual."
Adverse criticism has so far not inhibited Zeffirelli's energy, esteem or income. His salary for Romeo and Juliet was $50,000 plus a hefty percentage, and he will make even more from his new projects, notably a movie of Brecht's Galileo, starring Rod Steiger. At his bachelor villa near Rome, Zeffirelli remains the low-pressure gran signore, entertaining ten or twelve friends for lunch, inhaling gusts of Winston smoke from fingertip-held cigarettes. His braggadocio extends even to his genealogy. "One day my father showed up with an armful of documents," he recalls. "He finally had documented proof of my origins. I told myself that it really wasn't so bad being a bastard now that I knew I was descended from one of the world's most celebrated bastards —Leonardo da Vinci."