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.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
