Italian director and politician Franco Zeffirelli was BOTD in 1923. Born in Florence as the product of an affair, he was given the surname “Zeffiretti”, misspelled in the births register as Zeffirelli. Following his mother’s early death, he was raised by English expatriates, an experience later recounted in his film Tea With Mussolini. As a child, he had a sexual relationship with a Catholic priest, which he claimed throughout his life was not abusive. He graduated from the Academia di Belle Arti Firenze in 1941, then fought as a partisan during World War Two, becoming an interpreter for the Scots Guards. After the war, he moved into theatre, becoming the assistant and lover of director Luchino Visconti, and also working with Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. He became famous as an opera director, acclaimed for his productions of La traviata and Norma with Maria Callas, and guided the young Joan Sutherland to stardom in an acclaimed 1964 production of Lucia di Lammermoor. He also had success with lavish film adaptions of The Taming of the Shrew, starring real-life couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and Romeo and Juliet starring teenage unknowns Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey as the star-cross’d lovers. His 1977 television mini-series Jesus of Nazareth, with a starry international cast, was also highly acclaimed. As he aged, his artistry became more conservative, focusing on kitsch spectacle, and he attacked younger directors Patrice Chéreau and Martin Scorsese for a perceived lack of reverence towards canonical texts. In the 1990s, he served two terms as Senator for the right-wing Forza Italia party, upholding the Catholic Church’s rejection of homosexuality and calling for the execution of women who had abortions. He publicly admitted his homosexuality in 1996, and legally adopted two of his male assistants. In 2019, he was accused of multiple charges of sexual harassment and assault. Actor Bruce Robinson stated that Zeffirelli made unwanted sexual advances during the filming of Romeo and Juliet, and that he modelled the lecherous Uncle Monty character in his screenplay for Withnail and I on Zeffirelli. Johnathon Schaech, the star of Zeffirelli’s 1993 film Sparrow, also described the director breaking into his hotel room and attempting to perform oral sex on him. Zeffirelli refused to respond to the allegations, and was never formally charged with assault. He died in 2019, aged 96.