Bjorn Andresen, reluctant ‘most beautiful boy,’ dies at 70

NEW YORK – Bjorn Andresen, a Swedish actor who as a teenager played an ailing composer’s object of unrequited desire in the 1971 film Death In Venice, but who resented being objectified by the film’s director, Luchino Visconti, who called him “the most beautiful boy in the world”, died on Oct 25 in Stockholm. He was 70.

The cause of his death, in a hospital, was cancer, said his daughter, Ms Robine Roman.

Andresen was 15 and had long blond hair and high cheekbones when he was cast as Tadzio, a Polish boy who visits Venice, Italy, with his family, in Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella.

Tadzio’s mere appearance bewitches composer Gustav von Aschenbach, played in the film by Dirk Bogarde. They meet in an elevator, leaving Aschenbach spellbound as they lock eyes but do not speak.

Aschenbach then follows Tadzio around the city and fantasises about him as a kind of artistic and romantic muse, before growing sick and dying in a beach chair as he reaches toward the boy.

In his 1983 autobiography, Dirk Bogarde: An Orderly Man, Bogarde described Andresen as “the perfect Tadzio” and said that he had “an almost mystic beauty”.

But, he added, “the last thing that Bjorn ever wanted, I am certain, was to be in movies”.

Visconti was also fixated on Andresen. During the boy’s screen test, the director asked him to strip to his swimsuit.

“When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn’t comfortable,” Andresen told Variety after the release of The Most Beautiful Boy In The World, a 2021 documentary about him directed by Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri.

“I wasn’t prepared for that. I remember when he posed me with one foot against the wall, I would never stand like that.

“When I watch it now,” he said, “I see how that son of a bitch sexualised me.”

He told The Guardian that Visconti was “the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work”.

Bjorn Johan Andresen was born Jan 26, 1955, in Stockholm. His parents were not married, and he never knew his biological father, an artist who died in an accident two years after he was born.

His mother, Ms Barbro (Erixon) Andresen, a poet and artist, married Mr Per Andresen, who adopted Bjorn. She died by suicide when her son was 10.

Andresen began seriously studying the piano at 6. Not quite a decade later, he was playing in a dance band when his grandmother, who had already begun pushing him into acting, took him out of a rehearsal to audition for Visconti.

“All that he could think about was he would be late for his rehearsal,” Ms Roman said in an interview. “Music was his life. Acting just happened.”

During the making of Death In Venice, Visconti acted protectively toward Andresen. But the boy felt unprepared when Visconti took him to a gay club after the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1971.

In the documentary, Andresen recalled feeling besieged by “voracious looks, wet lips and rolling tongues” and getting drunk to cope with the unwanted attention. He wondered if Visconti, who was gay, was testing him to see if he was also gay, which he was not.

At a news conference at Cannes, where Death In Venice was nominated for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize, Visconti seemed ready to discard Andresen, saying that he had been “more beautiful” during filming, that he was at “an awkward age” and that he “might” become a handsome man. Luchino Visconti died in 1976, at age 69.

At Cannes, Andresen felt overwhelmed by the sudden spasm of fame that he faced – which was most likely inflamed by Visconti’s claim, when the movie had opened in London that March, that Andresen was “the most beautiful boy in the world”.

In the documentary, Andresen compared his fans to “swarms of bats around me”. After promoting Death In Venice, he travelled to Japan, where the film had made him a teen idol; he made records and appeared in TV commercials there, and some young women carried scissors in the hope of snipping off locks of his hair.

“You’ve seen the pictures of the Beatles in America?” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2003. “It was like that. There was a hysteria about it.”

His looks also brought him a brief fling with Carrie Fisher, whom Andresen met in Paris in 1976, the year before her breakout role in Star Wars. She approached him in a bar and asked him if he was, indeed, Bjorn Andresen.

“He was fed up with fame and he asked her, ‘Why?’” Roman said. “And she said, ‘I’ve been carrying your photo in my wallet.’”

The image of his youthful beauty followed him.

When feminist academic Germaine Greer’s erotically charged study of the young male face and form was published as The Boy in 2003, a photograph of a shirtless Andresen was on the cover.

No one had asked him about using the picture, he told the press, and he would not have granted his permission if anyone had.

“I can’t wait to age,” he told The Evening Standard of London in 2003. “I’m looking forward to the peace and quiet. I don’t want my face on film posters. I have hated it.”

Andresen continued to act, mostly on television in Sweden but also in films, including a memorable turn in Ari Aster’s 2019 horror movie, Midsommar.

He was also a keyboard player in a dance band, a composer of jazz and bossa nova music, the arranger of the music for a Swedish production of The Rocky Horror Show, and the manager of a small theatre in Stockholm.

In addition to his daughter, Andresen is survived by two granddaughters and a sister, Ms Annike Andresen.

His marriage to Ms Susanna Roman ended in divorce. A son, Mr Elvin, died in 1986 of sudden infant death syndrome, while Andresen slept next to him. NYTIMES