Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who became a star of 60s and 70s art cinema with roles in films such as Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, and Ludwig and Joseph Losey’s The Romantic Englishwoman, has died aged 78. His death was announced by his management agency, which posted a statement on its website saying Berger had “passed away peacefully but unexpectedly” in Salzburg, the city where he grew up.
Born Helmut Steinberger in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl in 1944, Berger studied acting in London before moving to Italy, where he met and began a relationship with acclaimed director Luchino Visconti, nearly 40 years his senior. Visconti gave him his first acting role, a small part in the comic anthology The Witches, and subsequently cast him in a spectacular role in his landmark 1969 epic The Damned. Berger played Martin von Essenbeck, a scion of a wealthy industrial family who struggle for control over the business in interwar Germany as the Nazis rise to power; for the film, Berger famously performed in drag as Marlene Dietrich and was subsequently nominated for a Golden Globe for most promising male newcomer.
Berger then starred in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and was cast in Vittorio de Sica’s 1970 masterwork The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, as a member of prosperous Italian family that fall victim to the fascists during the second world war. Berger was subsequently cast in another signature role in Visconti’s biopic of Bavaria’s eccentric 19th-century King Ludwig II. Berger reunited again with Visconti for Conversation Piece, released in 1974, in which he starred opposite Burt Lancaster in a drama inspired by his and Visconti’s relationship; in the same period he played one of his many playboy-gigolo characters opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda in Ash Wednesday, and another opposite Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson in The Romantic Englishwoman. In the Tinto Brass-directed Salon Kitty, he returned to the combination of sleaze and Nazism as an SS man who sets up a brothel for spying purposes.
After Visconti’s death in 1976, which precipitated a personal crisis, Berger struggled in his career, but secured a prominent role in TV series Dynasty as Fallon Carrington’s sleazy fiance Peter De Vilbis, who dies in a plane crash. He also had a small part as corrupt Vatican accountant Frederick Keinszig in The Godfather Part III while continuing to work in mostly European productions. Late work included the 1989 incarnation of Yves Saint Laurent in the 2014 biopic of the fashion designer directed by Bertrand Bonello, and his final role in Albert Serra’s 2019 film Liberté, which he plays an 18th-century aristocrat who organises a night of outdoor debauchery.
Aside from his relationship with Visconti, Berger, who was bisexual, was associated with numerous celebrities of the era, and married Francesca Guidato in 1994.
