Björn Andrésen, the Swedish actor best known for his breakout role in the 1971 film Death in Venice, has died aged 70.
At 15, Andrésen was cast in Italian director Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s novella, in which he played Tadzio, a beautiful boy with whom an older man, played by Dirk Bogarde, becomes obsessed.
Visconti called Andrésen “the most beautiful boy in the world” in the press, a title which stuck – much to the dismay of Andrésen, who would later speak of how his negative experience working with Visconti affected the rest of his life.
“I felt like an exotic animal in a cage,” he told the Guardian in 2003. Making the film had, he said in 2021, “screwed up my life quite decently”.
Andrésen’s death was announced on Sunday by Kristian Petri and Kristina Lindström, the co-directors of The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, a 2021 documentary about the actor.
Petri told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that Andrésen died on Saturday, while Lindström remembered him as “a brave person.” No cause of death was given.
Andrésen was born in Stockholm in 1955. After the suicide of his mother when he was 10, he was raised by his grandmother, who pushed him into acting and modelling because, he later said, “she wanted a celebrity in the family”.
His performance in Death in Venice made him an overnight star, but the experience was not all positive. Visconti took him to a gay nightclub with a group of men when he was just 16, which made him feel “very uncomfortable”.
“I knew I couldn’t react. It would have been social suicide. But it was the first of many such encounters,” he said.
He said he would have told Visconti to “fuck off” if he were still alive and that the director “didn’t give a fuck” about his feelings, adding: “I’ve never seen so many fascists and assholes as there are in film and theatre. Luchino was the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.”
After Death in Venice, Andrésen went to Japan, where the film had been a big hit. There, he became a pop star and model, appeared in several commercials and gained a huge female following. “You’ve seen the pictures of the Beatles in America?” he told the Guardian in 2003. “It was like that. There was a hysteria about it.”
Andrésen’s aspirations lay in music, and he became an accomplished pianist and musician. He continued to act, appearing in more than 30 movies and TV series, mostly made in Sweden. He described his career as “chaos” and claimed Tadzio had haunted him into adulthood. “My career is one of the few that started at the absolute top and then worked its way down,” he said. “That was lonely.”
Andrésen made headlines in 2003 when he objected to feminist Germaine Greer using a photograph of himself on the cover of her book The Beautiful Boy without asking him. Some of his objections related to his experience with Visconti, he said: “Adult love for adolescents is something that I am against in principle. Emotionally perhaps, and intellectually, I am disturbed by it – because I have some insight into what this kind of love is about.”
But Greer’s publisher Thames and Hudson rejected his objections, saying it did not need his permission – only that of the photographer, David Bailey.
Ageing helped anonymise Andrésen and he eventually found peace in being an actor. In 2019 he appeared in a small role in Ari Aster’s horror film Midsommar playing an elderly man who has his face smashed in with a mallet while sacrificing himself at a pagan ceremony. Andrésen was delighted by the role, saying: “Being killed in a horror movie is every boy’s dream.”
Andrésen had two children with his ex-wife, the poet Suzanna Roman: a daughter, Robine, and a son, Elvin, who died of sudden infant death syndrome at nine months old.
