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 Metropolitan Opera. His homosexuality was widely known within Italian theatrical and operatic circles for decades, rooted in part in his early, formative personal and professional relationship with the director Luchino Visconti, whom he met in postwar Florence and who first employed him as an actor and then as an assistant director on his films. Zeffirelli did not publicly confirm that he was gay until 1996, saying he preferred the term "homosexual" to "gay," and he remained largely guarded about his personal life even in his 1986 memoir, Zeffirelli: An Autobiography. He was also a controversial figure in Italian politics, serving two terms in the Senate as a right-wing member of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party while publicly upholding the Catholic Church's opposition to homosexuality and abortion, a stance that drew criticism from LGBTQ+ advocates given his own life.