THE NEW YORK TIMES: At 15, he played the muse to an ailing composer in Luchino Visconti’s film “Death in Venice.” He later said he’d felt sexualized by the director.
Bjorn Andresen, a 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 on Oct. 25 in Stockholm. He was 70.
The cause of death, in a hospital, was cancer, said his daughter, Robine Roman.
Mr. Andresen (pronounced “an-DRAY-son”) 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,” Mr. Bogarde described Mr. 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.” » | Richard Sandomir | Wednesday, October 29, 2025
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