Björn Andrésen, the actor and musician finest recognized for his breakout position as a teenager in 1971’s Loss of life in Venice, has died. He was 70.
Andrésen died Saturday, Kristian Petri, co-director of The Most Stunning Boy within the World, a 2021 documentary concerning the actor, advised the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. No reason behind demise was revealed.
Andrésen broke out as a 15-year-old actor in Italian director Luchino Visconti’s Loss of life in Venice, an adaptation of the 1912 novella of the identical identify by German writer Thomas Mann. He performed Tadzio, with whom an older man performed by Dirk Bogarde turns into obsessed.
On the premiere of the movie, Visconti referred to Andrésen as “essentially the most stunning boy on the planet,” a moniker that adopted him all through his life, a lot to his chagrin.
Andrésen spoke about his adverse experiences with Visconti and the results of in a single day worldwide fame. He stated the director took him to a homosexual nightclub with a gaggle of grown males when he was simply 16. Andrésen, who was straight, stated he was not homophobic, however the way in which he was handled there, particularly at such a younger age, made him “very uncomfortable.”
“The waiters on the membership … checked out me uncompromisingly as if I used to be a pleasant meaty dish,” he stated. “I knew I couldn’t react. It will have been social suicide. But it surely was the primary of many such encounters.”
After the movie was launched, Visconti by no means spoke with Andrésen once more, and the actor talked brazenly about how the “most stunning” label affected him personally and professionally. “I felt like an unique animal in a cage,” he advised The Guardian in 2003.
4 years in the past in one other piece in The Guardian, he stated he would have advised Visconti to “fuck off” if he have been nonetheless alive and that the director “didn’t give a fuck” about his emotions.
“I’ve by no means seen so many fascists and assholes as there are in movie and theaer,” Andrésen stated. “Luchino was the type of cultural predator who would sacrifice something or anybody for the work.”
In that very same interview, he stated Loss of life in Venice “screwed up my life fairly decently” and lamented the truth that he would eternally be recognized primarily for that one movie.
Actually, Andrésen was an achieved pianist and musician. He additionally grew to become a pop star in Japan after the discharge of Loss of life in Venice and carried out and toured repeatedly with the Sven Erics dance band.
Years later, Petri and Kristina Lindström used the “most stunning” quote because the title of their documentary about Andrésen, which additionally targeted on the tragedies that befell him all through his life. The doc, which premiered at Sundance, gained the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize on the pageant.
Petri advised Dagens Nyheter that Andrésen was a “courageous particular person.”
“Kristina and I had lengthy talked about desirous to make a full-length movie about Björn,” Petri stated. “The thought was that he would inform his story himself, and we talked to him for an entire yr earlier than we began filming. Then we filmed for a number of years — and it was each a enjoyable and at occasions painful shoot.”
Andrésen’s dad died in an accident when Andrésen was younger, and his mother died by suicide when he was 10.
He had two kids together with his ex-wife, poet Susanna Roman: a daughter, Robine, and a son, Elvin, who died of sudden toddler demise syndrome at 9 months previous. Andrésen was reportedly mendacity subsequent to his son, drunk, when he died; the actor then went right into a interval of deep melancholy and alcohol abuse.
Whereas Andrésen as soon as described his profession as “chaos,” he appeared in additional than 30 motion pictures and TV sequence, together with a small position within the 2019 people horror movie Midsommar.
Mike Barnes contributed to this report.