Björn Andrésen, Swedish actor who starred in Death in Venice, dies aged 70 | Movies

Swedish actor Björn Andrésen, known for his groundbreaking role in the 1971 film Death in Venice, has died at the age of 70.

At the age of 15, Andrésen starred in Italian director Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s novella. In this film, he played Tadzio, a beautiful boy who becomes obsessed with an old man played by Dirk Bogarde.

Visconti called Andrésen “the most beautiful boy in the world” in the press, a name that horrified Andrésen, who later spoke of how the experience of working with Visconti affected the rest of his life.

“I felt like an exotic animal in a cage,” he told the Guardian in 2003. He said in 2021 that making the film “pretty much ruined my life.”

Andrésen’s death was announced Sunday by Kristian Petri and Kristina Lindström, co-directors of the 2021 documentary about the actor, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World.

Petri told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter: He said Andrésen died on Saturday, and Lindström remembered him as a “brave person”. No cause of death was stated.

Andrésen was born in Stockholm in 1955. She was raised by her grandmother after her mother committed suicide when she was 10, and later said she “wanted to have a celebrity in the family”, pushing her into acting and modeling.

His performance in Death in Venice made him an overnight star, but the experience wasn’t all that positive. When she was just 16, Visconti took her to a gay nightclub with a group of men, which left her feeling “very uncomfortable”.

“I knew I couldn’t react. It would have been social suicide. But this was the first of many such encounters,” he said.

He said he would have told Visconti to “fuck you” if he were still alive and that he “didn’t care” about the director’s feelings, adding: “I’ve never seen so many fascists and scumbags as in cinema and theater. Luchino was the kind of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for his work.”

After Death in Venice, Andrésen went to Japan, where the film was a huge hit. There she became a pop star and model, appearing in many commercials and gaining a large number of female followers. “Have you seen photos of the Beatles in America?” “It was. There was hysteria about it,” he told the Guardian in 2003.

Andrésen’s passion was music and he became an accomplished pianist and musician. He continued acting, appearing in more than 30 films and TV series, mostly made in Sweden. He described his career as “chaos” and claimed that Tadzio haunted him into adulthood. “My career is one of the few that started at the absolute top and then came down,” he said. “It was lonely.”

Andrésen made headlines in 2003 when he objected to feminist Germaine Greer using his photo on the cover of her book Beautiful Child without asking him. Some of her objections related to her experience with Visconti: “Adult love for adolescents is something I am opposed to in principle. Maybe I am disturbed by it, emotionally and intellectually, because I have some insight into what that kind of love is about.”

But Greer’s publisher, Thames and Hudson, overruled her objections, saying her permission was not needed, only that of photographer David Bailey.

Getting older helped Andrésen understand his identity, and he finally found peace in being an actor. In 2019, he starred in Ari Aster’s horror film Midsommar, where he played an old man whose face was smashed with a hammer while sacrificing himself in a pagan ceremony. Andrésen was delighted with the role, saying: “It is every child’s dream to be killed in a horror movie.”

Andrésen had two children with his ex-wife, the poet Suzanna Roman: a daughter named Robine and a son named Elvin, who died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of nine months.