Björn Andrésen, the Swedish actor and musician best known for his breakout role as a youngster in 1971’s Death in Venice, has died. He was 70.
Andrésen died Saturday, Kristian Petri, co-director of The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, a 2021 documentary about the actor, told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. No cause of death was revealed.
Andrésen broke out as a 15-year-old actor in Italian director Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, an adaptation of the 1912 novella of the same name by German author Thomas Mann. He played Tadzio, with whom an older man played by Dirk Bogarde becomes obsessed.
At the premiere of the film, Visconti referred to Andrésen as “the most beautiful boy in the world,” a moniker that followed him throughout his life, much to his chagrin.
Andrésen spoke about his negative experiences with Visconti and the effects of overnight worldwide fame. He said the director took him to a gay nightclub with a group of grown men when he was just 16. Andrésen, who was straight, 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 meaty dish,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t react. It would have been social suicide. But it was the first of many such encounters.”
After the film was released, Visconti never spoke with Andrésen again, and the actor talked openly about how the “most beautiful” label affected him personally and professionally. “I felt like an exotic animal in a cage,” he told The Guardian in 2003.
Four years ago in another piece in The Guardian, 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.
“I’ve never seen so many fascists and assholes as there are in film and theaer,” Andrésen said. “Luchino was the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.”
In that same interview, he said Death in Venice “screwed up my life quite decently” and lamented the fact that he would forever be known primarily for that 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 band.
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 befell him throughout his life. The doc, which premiered at Sundance, won the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the festival.
Petri told Dagens Nyheter that Andrésen was a “brave person.”
“Kristina and I had long talked about wanting to make a full-length film about Björn,” Petri said. “The idea was that he would tell his story himself, and we talked to him for a whole year before we started filming. Then we filmed for several years — and it was both a fun and at times painful shoot.”
Andrésen’s dad died in an accident when Andrésen was young, and his mom died by suicide when he was 10.
He had two children with his ex-wife, poet Susanna Roman: a daughter, Robine, and a son, Elvin, who died of sudden infant death syndrome at 9 months old. Andrésen was reportedly lying next to his son, drunk, when he died; the actor then went into a period of deep depression and alcohol abuse.
While Andrésen once described his career as “chaos,” he appeared in more than 30 movies and TV series, including a small role in the 2019 folk horror film Midsommar.
Mike Barnes contributed to this report.