Björn Andrésen, the actor and musician who appeared in the 1971 movie Death in Venice as a teenager, has died He was 70.

His death on Saturday was confirmed in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter by Kristian Petri and Kristina Lindström, who co-directed the 2021 doc about Andrésen, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World. No cause of death was given.

Andrésen is known for his role in Death in Venice, Italian director Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of the 1912 novella of the same name by German author Thomas Mann.

He played a striking-looking teenager, who becomes the object of desire of composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde).

The film led to the moniker “the most beautiful boy in the world,” a phrased coined by Visconti to the press. This would haunt Andrésen for the rest of his career, following him wherever he went. “I felt like an exotic animal in a cage,” he told The Guardian in 2003. In The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, he said it had “screwed up my life quite decently.”

Born on January 26, 1955, in Stockholm, Andrésen was raised by his grandmother after his mother’s suicide, who pushed him into acting. His performance in Death in Venice, which was screened in Cannes, made him a star, but he felt uneasy with his fame and moved to Japan, where he became a huge music icon. He remained a professional musician into his later life and continued to act in Swedish films and TV shows. In 2019, he had a small role in Ari Aster’s horror Midsommar.

Source - DEADLINE