Who is Leonard Whiting? Romeo and Juliet actor sues Paramount for child abuse over nude scene

Actor Leonard Whiting, along with Olivia Hussey, have sued Paramount Pictures for sexual exploitation and child abuse over the use of nude footage in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. The footage was captured when they were 15 and 16, respectively.

Both Hussey and Whiting are seeking damages of more than $500 million, according to Variety.

Whiting and Hussey, who are now in their 70s, filed the lawsuit in Santa Monica Superior Court on Friday.

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In the lawsuit, the duo alleged that Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, had assured the actors that there would be no nudity in the film. However, in the final days of filming, the director allegedly asked them to perform in the nude with body makeup, “or the Picture would fail.”

“What they were told and what went on were two different things,” Tony Marinozzi, who is a business manager for both actors, said. “They trusted Franco. At 16, as actors, they took his lead that he would not violate that trust they had. Franco was their friend, and frankly, at 16, what do they do? There are no options. There was no #MeToo.”

Who is Leonard Whiting?

Leonard Whiting, a British retired actor and singer, is widely known for his role as Romeo in the 1968 Zeffirelli film version of Romeo and Juliet. He received the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor, for the role of Romeo.

Born on June 30, 1950, in Wood Green in England, Whiting is the only son of Peggy Joyce (O’Sullivan) and Arthur Leonard Whiting. He has two sisters. 

The 72-year-old went to attend St. Richard of Chichester School, Camden Town, leaving just a week or two before beginning work on Romeo and Juliet.

As a child singer, he won a Butlin’s Talent Contest hosted in the holiday camp’s packed out Gaiety Theatre. Whiting was later spotted by a theatrical agent at the Connaught Rooms Holborn, where he was performing at a Jewish wedding at the age of 12.

Whiting played the Artful Dodger in the long-running London musical for 15 months, and for 13 months in 1965–1966 appeared at Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre. He was cast as the Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in London’s Westminster Theatre.

In 1990, Whiting provided the voice of the Urpney scientist Urpgor in the children’s animated television series The Dreamstone.

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In 2014, he and Olivia Hussey reunited for the film Social Suicide (2015), their first work together in the 46 years since Romeo and Juliet.

In 1971, Whiting married model Cathee Dahmen. The following year, they had a daughter, Sarah Beth Whiting, who died in 2014 from cervical cancer.

He and Dahmen got divorced in 1977. Whiting then had a relationship with Valerie Tobin, who gave birth to their daughter Charlotte.

In 1995, Whiting married his assistant, Lynn Presser.