Franco Zeffirelli

HFPA journalists interviewed Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian film director who passed away in 2019 at the age of 96, several times. In 1973, speaking of his movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon about Francis of Assisi, he said:“I think the problem of dropouts it’s eternal and perennial, in the ‘60s we talked a little more about it, but it’s always been there, and it was at the time of Francis of Assisi in the 12th century.

Franco Zeffirelli, who died recently at 96, was Italian to his core, but also had a life long love of England, and won his Golden Globe for directing a movie in English with an all British cast, based on a Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, in 1968. The movie won the Best English Language Foreign Film, a discontinued Golden Globe category.