Classic vision: critics may sneer, but Franco Zeffirelli has remained true to his extravagant style. This season, he returns to the Met to refurbish his much-loved 1964 production of Falstaff.

Having turned seventy-nine this past February, Franco Zeffirelli is quite possibly the worlds oldest enfant terrible. One of the last great European directors of the postwar era, he has always enjoyed a reputation for glamorous excess and unbridled romanticism, not to mention a genius for self-preservation. He has survived numerous scrapes with death, most famously a car crash in 1969, with none other than Gina Lollobrigida at the wheel, that left him with a disfigured face (repaired through plastic surgery) and a renewed religious devotion that is with him still. Recently he underwent a hip replacement and suffered a near-fatal infection as a side effect, almost losing the ability to walk at all.

Professionally, his conservative stands on theater and politics (he served two terms as a right-wing, pro-life senator in the Italian parliament) continue to be controversial. It's easy for some to dismiss him as the outdated champion of a traditionalist approach to opera, especially in an age of abstract envelope-pushers such as Francesca Zambello, Graham Vick and Robert Wilson. But when he began his career, in the 1950s, Zeffirelli himself shook up the old school, rejuvenating an industry that had become moribund and reactionary. He breathed new life into such shopworn classics as Romeo and Juliet, which he staged at the Old Vic in London with a young Judi Dench, and which he filmed in 1967 to great acclaim with Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. The latter's then-notorious nude scene (which involved nothing more than an artfully arranged derriere) seemed to epitomize the youthquake generation.

Zeffirelli's staging of La Traviata with Maria Callas, originating in Dallas in 1958, and their Tosca at Covent Garden, the second act of which was broadcast on television, remain touchstones for opera aficionados and Callas cultists, exposing the coarse glamour that lies at the heart of both pieces. And his 1964 Met production of Falstaff, which is being revived and spruced up this spring, was and is a model of wit and charm.

Over the years, Zeffirelli has had his share of flops: a disastrous Othello at Stratford with John Gielgud; a calamitous Lady of the Camellias on Broadway with Susan Strasberg; his flower-power film about Francis of Assisi, Brother Sun, Sister Moon. And who can forget the Brooke Shields misfire, Endless Love? Perhaps Zeffirelli's biggest disappointment was his staging of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, which opened the Met at Lincoln Center in 1966. He and Barber had major conceptual differences of opinion: Zeffirelli wanted to outdo Aida in grandeur, while the American composer was thinking small, inward. Ultimately the production was undermined by the company's new revolving stage, which broke down during rehearsals. The production was retired by the Met after just eight performances in a single season.

The career of Franco Zeffirelli remains a conundrum. Flamboyant, mercurial, vain and ambitious, Zeffirelli is as famous as the stars he features in his highly personal films. His tastes are too highbrow for Hollywood yet too hoi polloi for the elite. At the Met, Zeffirelli's surname is a synonym for gorgeous overkill. But like so much else about him, even that name is an invention, carefully crafted for maximum effect. (He was the love child of a Florentine merchant named Ottorino Corsi and Alaide Garosi, a fashion designer who died when he was six.)

Zeffirelli remains an object of critical censure. His sets are overpopulated and at times historically incongruous. (Did Violetta really collect what looks like Fiesta Ware?) But Met audiences invariably greet his extravagances with spirited bursts of applause, returning time and again to lose themselves in the outsized fantasies he unfolds. The Cafe Momus in his Boheme seems as large as the Colosseum. His Tosca is a veritable Perillo tour of Rome, his Carmen a Gypsy circus worthy of Cecil B. DeMille. And as far as Zeffirelli's take on Turandot goes, not even Florenz Ziegfeld could have dreamed ...