“It was a cool summer job”. That was how the actor Björn Andrésen, who has died aged 70, described the role that made him a star and ruined his life.
In Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, Andrésen was Tadzio, the angelic 14-year-old holidaying with his family at the same hotel as Gustav von Aschenbach, an ailing composer who is fleetingly revived and energised by his obsession with the boy.
Dirk Bogarde, who played Aschenbach, called his young co-star “absolutely extraordinary”. He reported that Visconti “never allowed [him] to go into the sun, kick a football about with his companions, swim in the polluted sea, or do anything which might have given him the smallest degree of pleasure”. Bogarde described the boy “suffer[ing] it all splendidly” and going “like a lamb to the slaughter” to the makeup chair each morning. He also noted perceptively: “The last thing that Björn ever wanted, I am certain, was to be in movies.”
Andrésen was a 15-year-old aspiring musician when he auditioned successfully for the role at the insistence of his grandmother, a Mrs Worthington figure who raised him in Stockholm, his birthplace, following the disappearance and suicide of his single mother when he was 10. (His father’s identity is unknown.)
His grandmother devoted herself to pushing him in front of any available camera; he was on TV playing the piano at the age of six or seven. “She felt I was so talented and should be world famous,” he said in 2003.
He was proud to have landed a small role in the lyrical coming-of-age drama A Swedish Love Story (1970), the first film by Roy Andersson, who would go on to have a remarkable career as a morbid absurdist.
Death in Venice was another matter. The audition footage, which is included in The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, a 2021 documentary about Andrésen’s life, shows Visconti ordering him to smile and parade around the room. When told to undress, Andrésen laughs nervously but is soon down to his trunks, shifting awkwardly as he is inspected and evaluated by Visconti and his team.
Having won the role, he was denied a script, and the director forbade him from reading the original book. When Bogarde discovered that Andrésen had broken that rule, he warned him: “You do just what Visconti tells you and no more.” Dipping into Mann had at least lent him an insight into the meaning of his role: “I’m the Angel of Death, right?” he said correctly.
What he delivers on screen is more presence than performance, as might be expected from a posable doll denied any hint of agency by Visconti. Whether dressed in sailor’s outfit or striped clingy bathing suit, Tadzio, who is more overtly sexualised on screen than in print, treats Venice as his own personal catwalk. One disapproving viewer wrote to the New York Times to complain that “the boy … is seductive from beginning to end, ‘cruising’ Aschenbach so often you wonder why the old man doesn’t sneak into an alley with him”.
There was worse to come for Andrésen. He was mobbed at the film’s premiere at Cannes. “It felt like swarms of bats around me,” he said in the documentary. “It was a living nightmare.” At the accompanying press conference, Visconti joked about the boy losing his looks.
On set, Visconti had warned his crew not to lay a finger on Andrésen. After shooting wrapped, “Visconti and the team took me to a gay nightclub … The waiters at the club made me feel very uncomfortable. They looked at me uncompromisingly as if I was a nice meaty dish.”
His grandmother urged him to take on promotional duties for Death in Venice in Japan, where the film had been a hit. Once there, he was given a punishing schedule, plied with mysterious pills and strong-armed into a brief recording career.
In his early 20s, he spent a year in Paris on the promise of a role in Malcolm Leigh’s film How Lovely Are the Messengers, which was never made. While waiting, he was installed in an apartment by an older man and paid a generous stipend. He also fielded unwanted attention in the form of gifts and even love poems from male admirers. He would later tell the documentary’s directors, Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri, that he “[didn’t] regret much, except for his time in Paris”.
His life was subsequently blighted in other ways, too. He suffered from alcoholism and depression, and lost his nine-month-old son, Elvin, to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Andrésen continued to play music to a high level, studied drama and ran a small theatre in Stockholm, and acted on and off in Swedish films and TV series. “I’ve been working hard to reach anonymity,” he said. No wonder he spoke out angrily in 2003 after an image of himself at 15, photographed by David Bailey, was used on the cover of The Boy, Germaine Greer’s coffee table book eroticising youthful masculinity. “I have a feeling of being utilised that is close to distasteful,” he complained.
It was game of him to accept the splendid sick joke of starring in Ari Aster’s folk-horror film Midsommar (2019) as an elderly man who volunteers to be a human sacrifice by stepping off a cliff. When the fall doesn’t quite kill him, a bystander helpfully finishes him off with a mallet to the face.
By the time Andrésen was conducting promotional interviews for The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, he had lost none of his intelligence, sensitivity or air of mischief. Nor had his anger at Visconti dimmed. When I asked him what he would say to the director if he were still alive, he didn’t pause to consider his response: “Fuck off,” he said.
He is survived by his daughter, Robine, from his marriage to the poet Susanna Román, who was also the mother of Elvin. The marriage ended in divorce.
• Björn Johan Andrésen, actor, born 26 January 1955; died 25 October 2025
