The London gala premiere, at which he met the Queen and Princess Anne, was a breeze compared with the film’s unveiling at the Cannes film festival, where he was mobbed by carnivorous crowds. The late actor got at least one point right: “The last thing that Björn ever wanted, I am certain, was to be in movies.” If Andrésen didn’t already feel that way, the hoopla surrounding Death in Venice convinced him. To preserve Andrésen’s complexion and poise, “he was never allowed 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 … He suffered it all splendidly.” It felt like a swarm of bats around me – it was a living nightmareīogarde’s one complaint concerned the “slabs of black bubble gum which he would blow into prodigious bubbles until they exploded all over his face.” Andrésen shrugs at the detail: “I don’t remember that.” “He had an almost mystic beauty,” he wrote. In his 1983 memoir An Orderly Man, Bogarde described him with a mixture of fascination and pity. Visconti was an imposing figure who warned the crew to keep their hands off the boy during shooting, then dragged him off to a gay club after filming had finished.Īndrésen’s relationship with Dirk Bogarde – who played the ageing composer smitten with him – was nothing more than “neutral”. He is happy to have starred in Roy Andersson’s 1970 debut A Swedish Love Story (“I was there at the start of his career!”) and wasn’t too perturbed making Death in Venice. His grandmother, who was raising him after the death of his single mother four years earlier, was a regular Mrs Worthington, dispatching him to auditions practically as soon as he could walk. When he strolled into that audition, he was no stranger to the camera. ‘Everything I ever do will be associated with that film’… Andrésen at the Lido in Venice. Soon, though, he is down to his trunks, shifting awkwardly as Visconti and his assistants evaluate his body. At that last one, the young Andrésen lets slip a nervous laugh, wondering if he has misheard. The director issues a string of escalating demands: smile, walk round the room, remove your top. The documentary includes footage of his audition, where he looks angelic but intimidated, not least when Visconti’s interest in him becomes suddenly inflamed. I mean, we’re still sitting here talking about it 50 years later.” “Everything I ever do will be associated with that film. “Luchino was the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.” He makes his feelings about Death in Venice itself equally plain: “It has screwed up my life quite decently.” Although he is an accomplished pianist, no one seems very interested in that side of him.
“I’ve never seen so many fascists and assholes as there are in film and theatre,” says Andrésen. Visconti, he tells me, “didn’t give a fuck” about his feelings. No one who sees The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, a new documentary about Andrésen’s turbulent and tragic past, will be surprised by that answer. Asked what he would say to Visconti if he were here now, he doesn’t pause. His eyes twinkle as alluringly as ever but he’s no pussycat. Sitting alone in Stockholm today at the age of 66, he looks more like Gandalf with his white beard and his gaunt face framed by shoulder-length white locks. Its release in 1971 made him not merely a star but an instant icon – the embodiment of pristine youthful beauty. B jörn Andrésen was just 15 when he walked straight into the lion’s den, being cast as Tadzio, the sailor-suited object of desire in Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice.
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