Bjorn Andresen, the Swede actorknown for his role in the 1971 film Death in Venice, died at the age of 70.
At the age of 15, Andresen was cast by Italian director Luchino Visconti for the role of Taggio in Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name. The actor played a beautiful boy with whom an old man, played by Dirk Bogard, becomes obsessed.
Visconti had characterized Andresen at the time “the most beautiful boy in the world”a title that followed the actor throughout his life, something he found extremely unpleasant. The actor later spoke about how his experience with Visconti affected his later life.
“I felt like an exotic animal in a cage,” he told the Guardian in 2003.
In 2021, he added that his participation in the film had many negative consequences, despite the recognition it gave him.
His death was announced on Sunday (26.10.2025) by Christian Petrie and Christina Lindstrom, co-directors of the 2021 documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, which was dedicated to the actor.
The suicide of his mother at the age of 10
Andresen was born in Stockholm in 1955. After his mother committed suicide at the age of 10, he grew up with his grandmother. As he had said later, she was the one who pushed him to get involved with her acting and the modeling “because he wanted a celebrity in the family.”
His performance in “Death in Venice” made him famous overnighthowever the experience was not only positive.
Visconti had led him to one gay night club with a group of men when Andresen was just 16, which he said made him feel “very uncomfortable”. “I knew I couldn’t react. It would be social suicide. But it was the first of many such experiences.” he had stated.
Andresen had stated that if Visconti were alive, he would tell him to “go f@@@ing”, adding that the director “didn’t give a damn” about his feelings. “As many fascists and m@@@es that exist in cinema and theater, I have not met them anywhere else. Lucino was a kind of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything – or anyone – for the sake of his work,” he had said.
After Death in Venice, Andresen traveled to Japan, where the film had been a huge success. There, she became a pop star and model, appearing in many commercials and gaining a rabid female following. “Have you seen the pictures of the Beatles in America?” he had told the Guardian in 2003. “It was the same. There was hysteria.”
His ambitions, however, lay in music, being an excellent pianist and musician. He continued to work as an actor, appearing in more than 30 films and TV series, mostly in Sweden.
He described his career as “chaos” and admitted that the role of Tazio “haunted” him in his adult life. “My career is one of the few that started at the absolute top and then took the bottom ride,” he had said, explaining that for years he felt intense loneliness.
Andresen made headlines in 2003 when he protested that feminist author Germaine Greer used his photo on the cover of her book The Beautiful Boy without asking his permission.
He himself had explained at the time that his disagreement was a result of his experience with Visconti: “Adult love for teenagers is something I am fundamentally opposed to. Emotionally, perhaps intellectually, it disturbs me because I have some knowledge of what lies behind this kind of love.”
However, publishing house Thames and Hudson overruled his objections, arguing that it did not need its own permission, but only that of the photographer, David Bailey.
In 2019, he appeared in a small role in Ari Aster’s horror film “Midsummer”, where he played an old man who is killed with a hammer after a failed suicide attempt in a pagan ceremony.
Andresen had expressed his excitement about the role, saying that “being killed in a horror movie is every boy’s dream”.
From his marriage to his ex-wife, the poet Suzanna Roman, he had two children: Robin and Elvin, who died at the age of nine months from sudden infant death syndrome.