Franco Zeffirelli

Gian Franco Corsi Zeffirelli was born in Italy on 12 February 1923 and came of age directing opera and theatre in the postwar years, building a reputation for stagings so lavish they courted both praise and controversy. His film work followed the same template: The Taming of the Shrew in 1967 with Taylor and Burton, then Romeo and Juliet in 1968, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director. In 1977 his Biblical miniseries Jesus of Nazareth became a perennial Easter and Christmas fixture across continents. He kept working through the decades - Hamlet with Mel Gibson in 1990 - while also serving as a Forza Italia senator for Catania from 1994 to 2001. Honors accumulated: Grand Officer of the Italian Republic in 1977, an honorary British knighthood in 2004, the Premio Colosseo from Rome in 2009. He died on 15 June 2019.