‘Death in Venice’ star turned 70

Björn Andrésen, the Swedish actor and musician best known for his breakthrough role as a young man in 1971. Died in Venice, died. He was 70 years old.

Andrésen died on Saturday, Kristian Petri, co-director of The most beautiful boy in the worlda 2021 documentary about the actor, told the Swedish newspaper Today’s news. No cause of death has been revealed.

Andrésen became known at the age of 15 in the film by Italian director Luchino Visconti Died in Venice, an adaptation of the 1912 short story of the same name by German author Thomas Mann. He plays Tadzio, who an older man played by Dirk Bogarde becomes obsessed with.

At the film’s premiere, Visconti called Andrésen “the most beautiful boy in the world”, a nickname that followed him throughout his life, much to his regret.

Andrésen spoke about his negative experiences with Visconti and the effects of his overnight global fame. He said the manager took him to a gay nightclub with a group of adult men when he was just 16 years old. Andrésen, who was heterosexual, said he was not homophobic, but the way he was treated there, especially at such a young age, made him “very uncomfortable.”

“The waiters at the club… looked at me uncompromisingly as if I was a nice plate of meat,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t react. It would have been social suicide. But it was the first in a long series of encounters of this type.”

After the film’s release, Visconti never spoke to Andrésen again, and the actor spoke openly about how the “most beautiful” label affected him personally and professionally. “I felt like a caged exotic animal,” he said. The guardian in 2003.

Four years ago, in another room The guardianhe said he would have told Visconti to “fuck off” if he were still alive and that the director “didn’t care” about his feelings.

“I have never seen so many fascists and assholes as in the cinema and the theater,” Andrésen said. “Luchino was the kind of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for his work. »

In the same interview, he said Death in Venice “wasted my life pretty decently” and lamented the fact that he would always be known primarily for this one film.

In fact, Andrésen was an accomplished pianist and musician. He also became a pop star in Japan after the release of Death in Venice and performed and toured regularly with the Sven Erics dance group.

Years later, Petri and Kristina Lindström used the “most beautiful” quote as the title of their documentary about Andrésen, which also focused on the tragedies that happened to him throughout his life. The documentary, which premiered at Sundance, won the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the festival.

Petri said Today’s news that Andrésen was a “courageous person”.

“Kristina and I had been talking for a long time about wanting to make a feature film about Björn,” Petri said. “The idea was for him to tell his story himself, and we talked to him for a year before we started filming. Then we filmed for several years, and it was both a fun and sometimes painful shoot.”

Andrésen’s father died in an accident when Andrésen was young and his mother committed suicide when he was 10 years old.

He had two children with his ex-wife, the poet Susanna Roman: a daughter, Robine, and a son, Elvin, who died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 9 months. Andrésen was allegedly lying next to his son, drunk, at the time of his death; the actor then enters a period of deep depression and alcohol abuse.

While Andrésen once referred to his career as “chaos”, he has appeared in over 30 films and television series, including a small role in the 2019 folk horror film. Solicitude.

Mike Barnes contributed to this report.