Olivia hussey, star of zeffirelli's romeo and juliet: 'i was wild'

At their first press conference in 1967, Romeo and Juliet clutched each other's hands. "For safety," star Olivia Hussey insisted to the Guardian. The paper noted that director

Franco Zeffirelli's 16-year-old heroine still spoke Shakespeare with a Spanish lilt. As a child, Hussey – birth name Osuna – left Buenos Aires for London with her mother and brother,

unaware that she wouldn't see her father again until she became so famous that the Argentinean government flew her home to hug her grandmother on live TV. Fame hadn't taken long to

arrive. As Hussey recounts in her lively new autobiography, The Girl on the Balcony, a year after the trio arrived in the UK, she turned to her mother and announced: "I think it's

time I started taking my career seriously." She was eight. "I used to walk around the house with a towel on my head pretending to be a nun," says Hussey, now 67. "One

day I just said, 'I don't know about _being_ a nun. I like _pretending_ to be a nun. Maybe if I was an actress, I could pretend to be a nun and still be me." Her vow came

true. After Romeo and Juliet – which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year – turned her and co-star Leonard Whiting into international idols, she went on to play both the Virgin Mary and

Mother Teresa. Laughs Hussey: "That was my destiny." Off-screen, Hussey's look is a touch more rock'n'roll. At an organic Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles,

she's wearing all-white with a leopardskin jacket, stacks of silver rings, and boots embroidered with roses. Her husband of 29 years, David Eisley, headed a Sunset Strip metal band when

they met in the 80s. In the book, he comes zooming into her life on a Harley. That memory is half hers, half her eldest son Alex Martin's, who co-wrote the chapters that Hussey

couldn't bring herself to type. The hardest concerned the death in 1987 of her first husband, Dino Martin, who flew from LA to Britain to beg her for a date. She said no. But a year

later, Hussey moved to California, and eventually said yes. The Girl on the Balcony is most startling when Hussey rappels off Shakespeare's ledge to scamper around Hollywood. She

arrived in Los Angeles a month after Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family – and moved into the crime scene on Cielo Drive, which was owned by her manager Rudi Altobelli. Cops and

gawkers haunted the house. One morning, Hussey was making coffee when Manson girl Linda Kasabian gave District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi a walkthrough of the attack. "I could hear her

say, 'And that Abigail Folger was lying over there and she had lots of stab wounds,'" says Hussey. "People would say, 'How could you live there?' I'd say

it was actually the safest house in Hollywood. There was a button under the desk in the living room that buzzed directly to the Beverly Hills police. When you walked in there, there were no

bad vibes or anything. All I felt was the sweetness of Sharon. I never felt afraid." It was a dramatic introduction to Los Angeles. Overnight, everyone began locking their doors. Hussey

briefly dated Terry Melcher, then thought to be Charles Manson's intended target, who now travelled with bodyguards. "Terry was a sweetheart," says Hussey, "but he was

fucked up." Hussey found herself at the centre of a celebrity shift. Dino was the eldest son of the Rat Pack's Dean Martin. Dinner at the in-laws meant meeting everyone from Sammy

Davis Jr and Truman Capote to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Meanwhile, Dino surprised his bride by bringing the Bee Gees home for dinner. She answered the door in her pyjamas. Hussey

represented that generational change, though her autobiography is too modest to say it. Part of the reason the public was obsessed with her Juliet was that Hussey was a groovy 60s teenager

who danced and drank and befuddled her elders. Her miniskirts and hippy hair were a sign that the kids – and maybe the whole globe – were changing. The journalists who managed to pin her

down for a quote fumbled for words. One older reporter lectured: "There aren't many girls at 15 I know that smoke cigarettes publicly." Hussey coolly replied: "Oh, there

are." She gazed at him impassively and took a drag. "I loved playing Juliet," says Hussey today. "The only part I didn't like was all the PR. It was exhausting, and

I was this wild little thing." Online, she's continually discovering shots of herself she's never seen. "I must have had people photographing me everywhere I went,"

she says. She posts them on Instagram where today's high-schoolers, who discovered the film in English lessons, message her asking if she and Leonard really dated (yes) and plead for

love advice. "Lighten up!" Hussey responds. "Life just unfolds. If I know nothing else, I know that in two months your life can change completely." The book is structured

around a question Hussey poses on page four: "That girl on the balcony keeps asking, 'Has the life I've given you been worth it?'" The role wasn't a gift. It

was a trade. She and Whiting gave Zeffirelli's blockbuster a jolt of youthful rebellion that wired a 400-year-old play to the anti-Vietnam war protests. Teenagers had had enough of

dying for their parents' feud. In exchange, Romeo and Juliet gave Hussey immediate and eternal fame, plus a bottle of diet pills – the producers' idea – that her mother furiously

flushed down the toilet. Too late. She'd swallowed the fear that her body was too curvy for the camera. On set, Zeffirelli called her "Boobs O'Mina". Later, he confessed

that she was the unrequited love of his life. "I know. I _knew_," says Hussey. "We had a bond. I'd look at him and know exactly how he wanted me to play it." In the

foreword, Zeffirelli, now 94, writes: "You are the object of my adoration." She still gives the director a kiss on his birthday. She considers herself unscathed, though she

pointedly notes that the #MeToo movement is "fantastic," adding: "We've all been harassed in one way or another. Luckily for me, I had a big mouth and I was always being

interviewed. Those sleazy people, I'd meet them but they wouldn't dare." The book does, however, contain an account of a violent rape by her then boyfriend, actor Christopher

Jones, while she was living in Cielo Drive. Hussey discovered that she was pregnant and had a termination. For a while, Hussey's life seemed to move so fast she could barely hang on.

She nervously peed in her couture dress when presented to the Queen at Romeo and Juliet's royal premiere, and said no to several projects she probably should have done, such as the

sidekick role in True Grit_._ ("John Wayne doesn't really do anything for me," she shrugged to producer Hal Wallis.) Later, when she had to be less picky, she acted alongside

everyone from Bette Davis to Traci Lords. She made good movies, including Bob Clark's slasher Black Christmas, a favourite of Elvis Presley's, and legendary bombs such as the 1973

musical Lost Horizon, ranked by Golden Turkey awards founder Michael Medved as one of the 50 worst films of all time. By 22, Hussey was a divorced single mother who was terrified to leave

her house, thanks to agoraphobia aggravated by strangers stopping her on the street. "It wasn't that I was snobby – I was shy," she says. "I've always been so

sensitive. I cry easily. I'm an _actress_." A friend dragged her to meet Swami Muktananda, a controversial guru on his first American tour, and for the first time, she fell in

instant – if platonic – love, just like Juliet. "When I met him, the world stopped," says Hussey. Muktananda, she says, touched her third eye and her vision flooded with blue

light. She followed him to a retreat in the Catskills, and another in India, braving the onlookers who wanted an autograph in a moment when she was so shattered, she barely recognised

herself. "I loved him so much and in the end he helped me love myself," she says. Love knocked her flat again when she met her second husband, Tokyo pop star Akira Fuse (though she

didn't speak a word of Japanese) and permanently, when she met Eisley. "My rock," she calls him. "I didn't think I could ever fall in love again, because I'd

loved so much." She had two more children, Maximillian Fuse and the actor India Eisley, who put her career on pause for a year to help Hussey through breast cancer for a second time –

she is now in remission. Hussey herself continues to act sporadically, though now that The Girl on the Balcony is published, her energy has shifted toward animal rights activism. Her twitter

page is cluttered with emojis of hearts and tears for an endless stream of rescue dogs and tragic animal heroes, like a video of an armless squirrel named Karamel. "A dog gives you

unconditional love and its completely in the moment. We should all strive to be like our dogs," says Hussey. "It's all about love when you boil it down." Juliet ought to

know.