Bjorn Andreessen obituary | film

“It was a great summer job.” This is how actor Björn Andersen, who has died at the age of 70, described the role that made him a star and destroyed his life.

In Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, Andriessen is Tadzio, an angelic 14-year-old vacationing with his family in the same hotel as Gustav von Aschenbach, an ailing composer fleetingly revived and invigorated by his obsession with the boy.

Dirk Bogarde, who played Aschenbach, described his young colleague as “absolutely extraordinary”. He stated that Visconti “never allowed this [him] To go out into the sun, or kick a soccer ball with his buddies, or swim in the polluted sea, or do anything that might give him the least amount of pleasure.” Bogard described the boy as “suffering[ing] “Everything is great” and he goes “like a lamb to the slaughter” to the makeup chair every morning. He also pointed out knowingly: “I’m sure the last thing Björn ever wanted was to be in movies.”

Andreessen was a 15-year-old aspiring musician when he successfully auditioned for the role at the insistence of his grandmother, a character named Mrs. Worthington, who raised him in Stockholm, his hometown, after the disappearance and suicide of his single mother when he was 10. (His father’s identity is unknown).

His grandmother devoted herself to pushing him in front of any available camera; He was appearing on television playing the piano at the age of six or seven. “I felt like I was so talented and should be world famous,” he said in 2003.

He was proud to have landed a small role in the coming-of-age musical drama Swedish Love Story (1970), the film debut of Roy Andersson, who would go on to a brilliant career as an obsessive absurdist.

Death in Venice was another matter. The test footage, included in The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, a 2021 documentary about Andreessen’s life, shows Visconti ordering him to smile and parade around the room. When Andreessen is asked to undress, he laughs nervously, but quickly drops down to his pants, pacing awkwardly while Visconti and his team examine and evaluate him.

After winning the role, he was banned from writing the script, and the director prevented him from reading the original book. When Bogarde discovered that Andreessen had broken that rule, he warned him: “Do only what Visconti tells you to do, and do no more.” Being immersed in Mann has at least given him some insight into the meaning of his role: “I’m the angel of death, aren’t I?” Correctly said.

What he brings to the screen is more presence than performance, as would be expected from a poseable puppet who denied any hint of agency by Visconti. Whether he’s dressed as a sailor or in a striped bathing suit, Tadzio, who is more overtly sexual on screen than in print, treats Venice as his personal catwalk. One disapproving viewer wrote to the New York Times to complain that “the boy…is seductive from beginning to end, wandering around Aschenbach so much that you wonder why the old man doesn’t sneak off into an alley with him.”

There was worse for Andreessen. He was packed at the film’s premiere in Cannes. “I felt like swarms of bats were surrounding me,” he said in the documentary. “It was a living nightmare.” At the accompanying press conference, Visconti joked about the boy’s loss of appearance.

During filming, Visconti warned his crew not to lay a finger on Andreessen. After filming ended, “Visconti and the team took me to a gay nightclub… The waiters in the club made me feel very uncomfortable. They looked at me relentlessly as if I was a nice plate of meat.”

His grandmother urged him to take on promotional duties for Death in Venice in Japan, where the film was a huge success. Once there, he was given a brutal schedule, filled with obscure pills and armed to the teeth with a brief recording career.

In his early twenties, he spent a year in Paris with the promise of a role in Malcolm Leigh’s film How Beautiful Apostles Are, which never materialized. While he waited, an old man set him up in an apartment and paid him a generous salary. He has also received unwanted attention in the form of gifts and even love poems from male fans. He later told the documentary’s directors, Christina Lindström and Christian Petri, that “[didn’t] “I have many regrets, except for the time he spent in Paris.”

His life was then ruined in other ways as well. He struggled with alcoholism and depression, and lost his nine-month-old son, Elvin, to sudden infant death syndrome.

Andreessen continued to play music at a high level, studied drama and managed a small theater in Stockholm, and intermittently acted in Swedish films and television series. “I worked hard to achieve anonymity,” he said. No wonder he spoke out angrily in 2003 after a photo of himself at 15, taken by David Bailey, was used on the cover of Boy, Germaine Greer’s book evoking youthful masculinity. “I have a feeling of being exploited which is close to obnoxious,” he complained.

It was his game to take the wonderfully sick joke of starring in director Ari Aster’s folk horror film Midsommar (2019) as an elderly man who volunteers to be a human sacrifice by descending a cliff. When the fall didn’t quite kill him, a bystander helped finish him off with a hammer to the face.

By the time Andreessen was giving interviews for promotional appearances for The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, he had lost none of his wit, sensitivity, or mischievous good looks. His anger toward Visconti did not diminish. When I asked him what he would tell the director if he were still alive, he didn’t pause to think about his answer: “Fuck,” he said.

He is survived by his daughter, Robyn, from his marriage to the poet Susanna Roman, who was also Elvin’s mother. The marriage ended in divorce.