Actor who starred as the angelic boy Tadzio in the 1971 film Death in Venice - but found the resulting fame a ‘nightmare’
“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.)
