Franco Zeffirelli

Franco Zeffirelli was an Italian director of extraordinary visual grandeur, known for Romeo and Juliet (1968), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Jesus of Nazareth (1977), and La Traviata (1982), as well as decades of landmark opera productions at La Scala and the Met. He came out publicly as gay relatively late in his life, in his autobiography Zeffirelli: An Autobiography (1986), where he described a formative relationship with an older British scholar as a young man in Florence. His homosexuality had been widely known in the theatrical and operatic world throughout his career. He was also a controversial right-wing Italian politician.