In Memoriam: The Swedish Actor And Musician "Björn Andresen" Dies At 70

Björn Andresen, the reluctant "Most Beautiful Boy" dies at 70. Andresen the Swedish actor who as a teenager played an ailing composer's object of unrequited desire in the 1971 film "Death in Venice," but who resented being objectified by the film's director, Luchino Visconti, who called him "the most beautiful boy in the world," died last October 25 in Stockholm. The cause of death, in a hospital, was cancer, said his daughter, Robine Roman.

Mr. Andresen was 15 and had long blond hair and high cheekbones when he was cast as Tadzio, a Polish boy who visits Venice with his family, in Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann's 1912 novella. Tadzio's mere appearance bewitches the composer Gustav von Aschenbach, played in the film by Dirk Bogarde. They meet in an elevator, leaving Aschenbach spellbound as they lock eyes but do not speak. Aschenbach then follows Tadzio around the city and fantasizes about him as a kind of artistic and romantic muse, before growing sick and dying in a beach chair as he reaches toward the boy.

In his 1983 autobiography, "Dirk Bogarde: An Orderly Man," described Andresen as the perfect Tadzio and said that he had an almost mystic beauty. But, he added, the last thing that Bjorn ever wanted, I am certain, was to be in movies. Visconti was also fixated on Mr. Andresen. During the boy’s screen test, the director asked him to strip to his swimsuit. 

"When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn't comfortable," Mr. Andresen told Variety after the release of "The Most Beautiful Boy in the World," a 2021 documentary about him directed by Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri. I wasn't prepared for that. I remember when he posed me with one foot against the wall, I would never stand like that. When I watch it now,  he said, I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me.

Bjorn Johan Andresen was born on Jan. 26, 1955, in Stockholm. His parents were not married, and he never knew his biological father, an artist who died in an accident two years after he was born, his mother, Barbro (Erixon) Andresen, a poet and artist, married Per Andresen, who adopted Bjorn. She died by suicide when her son was 10.

Bjorn began seriously studying the piano at 6. Not quite a decade later, he was playing in a pop-rock band when his grandmother, who had already begun pushing him into acting, took him out of a rehearsal to audition for Visconti. "All that he could think about was he would be late for his rehearsal," Ms. Roman, his daughter, said in an interview. "Music was his life. Acting just happened."

During the making of "Death in Venice," Visconti acted protectively toward Mr. Andresen. But the boy felt unprepared when Visconti took him to a gay club after the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1971. In the documentary, Mr. Andresen recalled feeling besieged by voracious looks, wet lips and rolling tongues and getting drunk to cope with the unwanted attention. He wondered if Visconti, who was gay, was testing him to see if he was also gay, which he wasn't. 

At a news conference at Cannes, where "Death in Venice" was nominated for the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize, Visconti seemed ready to discard Mr. Andresen, saying that he had been more beautiful during filming, that he was at an awkward age and that he might become a handsome man. At Cannes, Mr. Andresen felt overwhelmed by the sudden spasm of fame that he faced — which was most likely inflamed by Visconti's claim, when the movie opened in London that March, that Mr. Andresen was "the most beautiful boy in the world."

After promoting "Death in Venice," he traveled to Japan, where the film had made him a teen idol; he made records and appeared in TV commercials there, and some young women carried scissors in the hope of snipping off locks of his hair. His looks also brought him a brief fling with Carrie Fisher, whom Mr. Andresen met in Paris in 1976, the year before her breakout role in "Star Wars." She approached him in a bar and asked him if he was, indeed, Bjorn Andresen.

Over the last 20 years or so, his flowing hair became gray and he obscured his face behind a beard that made him look something like Ian McKellen as the wizard Gandalf in the "Lord of the Rings" films.

Mr. Andresen continued to act, mostly on television in Sweden but also in films, including a memorable turn in Ari Aster's 2019 horror movie, "Midsommar." He was also a keyboard player in a dance band, a composer of jazz and bossa nova music, the arranger of the music for a Swedish production of  "The Rocky Horror Show," and the manager of a small theater in Stockholm.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Andresen is survived by two granddaughters and a sister, Annike Andresen. His marriage to Susanna Roman ended in divorce. A son, Elvin, died in 1986 of sudden infant death syndrome, while Mr. Andresen slept next to him. Mr. Petri, one of the directors of “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World,” said that he had known Mr. Andresen for more than 40 years and recognized him as a major cultural figure in Sweden, worthy of a documentary." He was a big thing for our generation," he said in an interview. "He was world famous and ‘the most beautiful boy.' We knew that he was not comfortable with what happened with Visconti, so we wanted to give him the chance to tell his own story.