“The world is hungry not only for food, but also for beauty.”
— Mother Teresa

When an actress has played Juliet (in “Romeo and Juliet”) and Mary, Jesus’ mother (in “Jesus of Nazareth”) – two of the most celebrated roles in theatre history, both under acclaimed director Franco Zefirelli – it’s hard to imagine a follow-up.  But when those parts have also resulted in a Golden Globe and two successive Donatello awards (the Italian equivalent of Oscars) as well, one might well assume there are no greater accomplishments.

But Olivia Hussey always knew she had one remaining role to play.  And, while it took more than 20 years to come about, she credits God with allowing her to portray Mother Teresa.
 
“I respected her compassion and her love and the way that she saw the face of Jesus in every person she met,” Hussey says.  “There was interest in the project [years ago], but it fell apart.  So I had to let it go, give it back to God.  If it’s meant to be, it will come back to me, I said.  And I truly believed that – I believe that about everything.  And it did come back.  It was 20 years of wishing and hoping and reading books on her.  Then suddenly, from out of the blue, it came back to me, with five days notice.”

The film, titled “Mother Teresa,” is being released on DVD by Fox Home Entertainment.  It tells the story of the diminutive Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, who became one of the most celebrated missionaries in history.  Born in Macedonia in 1910, Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace for her work with the poorest of the poor on the streets of Calcutta, before dying in 1997.

Hussey spent her early childhood in Argentina, the daughter of an Argentine opera and tango singer and a British mother, before moving to England at the age of seven, where she attended drama school and landed a lead in the acclaimed London stage play, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” alongside Vanessa Redgrave.  Zefirelli, who saw her performance, cast Hussey as Juliet, launching her film career at the age of 15.  Since then, she has worked with some of the greatest actors of all time, including Burt Lancaster and Ben Cross in “The Jewelers Shop;” Sir Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and Bette Davis in “Death on the Nile;” Ernest Borgnine in “The Last Days of Pompeii;” and, of course, Robert Powell, Anne Bancroft, James Earl Jones, Christopher Plummer, Anthony Quinn and Stacy Keach, to name just a few, in the renowned television miniseries, “Jesus of Nazareth.”