Career
Hussey appeared in a West End production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, playing Jenny opposite Vanessa Redgrave. Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli noticed her performance because "she was the only choice mature enough with experience and natural beauty to play Juliet while still looking 14." She was chosen out of 500 actresses to star in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet film, opposite 16-year-old Leonard Whiting's Romeo. Derek Smith of Slant said Hussey's performance "captures the passion and yearning of love-struck teens in a very contemporary manner". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian agreed, and said Hussey "has an otherworldly purity". Roger Ebert also gave her and Whiting high praise. She won a special David di Donatello Award and the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress in 1969.
After the success of Romeo and Juliet, Hollywood producer Hal B. Wallis offered her the title role in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and the co-starring role with John Wayne in True Grit (1969). In her 2018 memoir, Hussey recalled that she had "mumbled something about being interested in Anne of the Thousand Days" but that she "couldn't see herself with Wayne", concluding that this "adolescent and opinionated" remark ended her professional relationship with Wallis, who immediately withdrew his offer.
In 1971, Hussey appeared in the British drama All the Right Noises, followed by The Summertime Killer (1972), and the musical Lost Horizon. In 1974, Hussey played the lead role of Jess Bradford in the Canadian horror film Black Christmas (1974), which became influential as a forerunner of the slasher film genre of horror films. She played Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the 1977 television production of Jesus of Nazareth (her second work for director Zeffirelli). In 1978, she played Rosalie Otterbourne in Death on the Nile with Peter Ustinov, and appeared in The Cat and the Canary (1979). In 1979, she starred as Esther in the television film The Thirteenth Day: The Story of Esther.She starred as Marit in the Japanese film Virus (1980), and played Rebecca of York in the 1982 remake of Ivanhoe (1982); the same year, she had a lead role in the Australian horror film Turkey Shoot (1982). In 1987, Hussey, along with several well-known actors, made a cameo appearance in a clip for the Michael Jackson video "Liberian Girl". She was next offered the role of Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. When she read the screenplay and came across the rabbit in the boiling pot sequence, she was so disturbed that she quickly turned the role down.
In 1990, Hussey played Norma Bates, the mother of Norman Bates, in Psycho IV: The Beginning, a prequel to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), and appeared in the miniseries It, an adaptation of the Stephen King novel. These two roles along with Black Christmas earned her the label of scream queen.
Hussey played the lead in Mother Teresa of Calcutta (2003), a biographical film about Mother Teresa, for which she was presented with a Character & Morality in Entertainment Award on 12 May 2007 in Hollywood. She stated in an interview that it had been her dream to portray the role of Mother Teresa of Calcutta ever since she finished her role as the Virgin Mary in Jesus of Nazareth. Hussey later reunited with Whiting as on-screen partners in the film Social Suicide (2015), the only film that they both appeared in since Romeo and Juliet. In the project, Hussey's daughter, actress India Eisley, played their fictional daughter, Julia Coulson.
Hussey also worked as a voice actress, and was nominated for "Outstanding Individual Achievement for Voice Acting by a Female Performer in an Animated Television Production" at the Annie Awards for her work in the DC Animated Universe as Talia al Ghul. She voiced the character of Kasan Moor in the PC/Nintendo 64 game, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (1998) and was also in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011) as Jedi Master Yuon Par. She also lent her voice to Star Wars: Force Commander in 2000.
Hussey was slated to reprise her role as Jess Bradford in the Black Christmas fan film It's Me, Billy: Chapter 2, but withdrew from the project in November 2023 for health reasons. She was replaced with Lisa Kovack.
