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During the final week of 2024 two noted actresses–the first a teenager when she gained fame as one half of pop culture’s most famous romantic duo, the other a Broadway star who served food and laughs in a hit 1970s TV sitcom–passed away. MovieFanFare would like to take a moment to remember and look back at the lives and careers of Olivia Hussey and Linda Lavin.
The daughter of an English legal secretary and an Argentinian singer, Hussey was born Olivia Osuna in Buenos Aires in 1951. Moving with her mother and brother to London at seven, Olivia began taking acting lessons and made her professional debut at 13, using her mother’s maiden name as a stage name. It was when she was appearing in the 1966 West End production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that young Hussey caught the eye of director Franco Zeffirelli. Impressed by her natural beauty and maturity, the Italian filmmaker selected her out of 500 hopefuls to climb into the balcony for his 1968 big-screen version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
The on-screen (and, briefly, off-screen) chemistry between Hussey and co-star Leonard Whiting helped make the film one of 1968’s biggest hits and earned its teenage leads Golden Globe Awards for Most Promising Newcomers. While she was considered for starring roles in such pictures as Anne of the Thousand Days and True Grit, the actress endured bouts of agoraphobia and an abusive relationship with actor Christopher Jones in the late ’60s. Olivia co-starred in a British “kitchen sink drama,” All the Right Noises, in 1971 and the Euro-thriller The Summertime Killer the year later, while 1973 saw her featured in producer Ross Hunter’s ill-fated musical remake of Lost Horizon.
In 1974 Olivia played a college student whose sorority house becomes the Yuletide target of a deranged killer in the seminal slasher film Black Christmas alongside Kier Dullea and Margot Kidder, while she reunited with Zeffirelli when he cast her as Mary in his epic 1977 TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. 1978 found her joining the ensemble casts of two very different whodunits, the Agatha Christie thriller Death on the Nile, with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot, and softcore auteur Radley Metzger’s updating of The Cat and the Canary.
Hussey specialized in small-screen projects in the 1980s and ’90s, appearing in such mini-series as The Bastard, The Pirate, The Last Days of Pompeii, and the original version of Stephen King’s It. She also played that most clinging and unhinged of mothers, Norma Bates, alongside Henry Thomas as son Norman in the flashback sequences of 1990’s Psycho IV: The Beginning. Her film work during that time included the 1980 disaster saga Virus, 1989’s The Jeweller’s Shop with Burt Lancaster (adapted from a play by Pope John Paul II), and the tasty 1996 horror spoof Ice Cream Man. More recently she starred as Mother Teresa of Calcutta in a 2003 biopic of the same name, supplied the voice of Ra’s Al Ghul’s daughter Talia in various DC animated series, and did voicework for Star Wars videogames.
Ironically, her final movie role came in the 2015 psychological drama Social Suicide, which reunited her with Leonard Whiting for the first time in nearly 50 years. 2018 saw the publication of her autobiography, “The Girl on the Balcony,” in which she detailed her decade-long battle against breast cancer. In 2022 Hussey and Whiting filed a $500 million lawsuit against Paramount for sexual harassment and exploitation during Romeo and Juliet’s nude scenes, a suit that was eventually dismissed. The actress, who once summed up her career by stating, “I can look back on 60 percent of the work I’ve done and say, ‘You know what? I wasn’t terrible in that,’” died on Dec. 27 at the age of 73.
Linda Lavin was born in Portland, Maine, in 1937. The daughter of a businessman and an opera singer and granddaughter of Jewish Russian emigres, she was active in theatre while attending the College of William and Mary. Moving to New York, Lavin made her Broadway debut in 1962 in the John Kander musical A Family Affair. By decade’s end she had been featured in such plays as It’s a Bird It’s a Plane It’s Superman, The Mad Show, Little Murders by Jules Feiffer, and Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers, for which she received the first of her six Tony nominations.
In the early 1970s Lavin moved to California with her then-husband, actor Ron Leibman. Turns in made-for-TV movies like 1974’s The Morning After and such series as Harry O and Rhoda led to Linda being cast as gung-ho Detective Wentworth in the first two seasons of Barney Miller. 1976 saw her land the role that would make her a national celebrity: widowed Phoenix waitress and aspiring singer Alice Hyatt in the CBS sitcom Alice, based on Martin Scorsese’s 1974 drama Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Over the course of nine seasons Lavin’s Alice would struggle to raise her adolescent son Tommy (Doug McKeon) and–with help from co-workers like quirky Vera (Beth Howland) and sassy Flo (Polly Holliday)–tolerate her gruff but lovable diner boss, Mel (Vic Tayback). The series earned Lavin an Emmy nomination and two Golden Globe Awards.
In 1986 Lavin returned to the Broadway stage in Simon’s Broadway Bound, for which she won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. While her movie appearances during the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s were rare (The Muppets Take Manhattan and See You in the Morning, among others), she was a Great White Way regular in everything from Gypsy to The Diary of Anne Frank, supplementing her stage work with co-starring roles in two short-lived TV series (Room for Two, Conrad Bloom) and three episodes of The O.C. During this time she and third husband Steve Bakunas lived in the coastal town of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Linda taught acting and singing classes and worked as a stage director.
Over the last decade or so Linda was featured in the films Wanderlust, The Intern, and Being the Ricardos, along with recurring TV turns in Sean Saves the World, B Positive, and, just last year, the Netflix limited series No Good Deed. On December 29 the 87-year-old actress passed away of complications from lung cancer. She will be seen posthumously in a 2025 Hulu series, Mid-Century Modern, and the movie One Big Happy Family.