Bjorn Andresen, the Swedish actor best known for his starring role in the 1971 film “Death in Venice,” has died at the age of 70.

At the age of just 15, Andreessen was chosen by Italian director Luchino Visconti for Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name. He played Tagio, a beautiful boy with whom an older man, played by Dirk Bogarde, becomes obsessed.

Visconti had then described Andresen as “the most beautiful boy in the world”, a title that followed the actor throughout his life – much to his annoyance. The actor had later spoken of how negatively his experience with Visconti had affected his later life.

“I felt like an exotic animal in a cage,” he had told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2003. In 2021, he added that his involvement in the film had had many negative effects on his life.

His death was announced on Sunday by Christian Petrie and Christina Lindstrom, the co-directors of 2021’s documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, which was dedicated to the actor.

The most beautiful man in the world, the most beautiful woman in the world.

Andreessen was born in Stockholm in 1955. After his mother committed suicide when he was ten years old, he grew up with his grandmother. As he later said, it was she who pushed him into acting and modelling “because she wanted there to be a celebrity in the family.”

His performance in Death in Venice made him famous overnight, but the experience was not all positive. Visconti had taken him to a gay nightclub with a group of men when Andresen was just 16, which he said made him “very uncomfortable.”

“I knew I couldn’t react. It would have been social suicide. But it was the first of many such experiences,” he had said.

Andresen had said that if Visconti had lived, he would have told him to “go f@@@k off”, adding that the director “didn’t give a damn” about his feelings. “As many fascists and b@@@es as there are in film and theatre, I’ve never met them elsewhere. Luquin 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 travelled to Japan, where the film had been a huge success. There, he became a pop star and model, appeared in many commercials and gained a fanatical female audience. “Have you seen the Beatles’ pictures in America?” he told the Guardian in 2003. “It was the same. There was hysteria.”

His ambitions, however, lay in music, as he was 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 Tajio “haunted” him in his adult life. “My career is one of the few that started at the absolute top and then plummeted to the bottom,” he had said. “It was lonely.”

Andresen was in the media in 2003 when he complained that feminist author Jermaine Greer used his picture on the cover of her book The Beautiful Boy without asking his permission. He explained at the time that part of his objection was related to his experience of Visconti: “Adult to teenage love is something I am opposed to from the outset. Emotionally, perhaps even intellectually, it upsets me – because I have some knowledge of what lies behind this kind of love.”

However, Thames and Hudson publishing house rejected his objections, arguing that he did not need his own permission, but only that of the photographer, David Bailey.

Over the years, Andresen eventually rid himself of celebrity and found peace through acting. In 2019, he appeared in a small role in Ari Aster’s horror film Midsommar, playing an elderly man who is killed with a hammer in a pagan ritual. Andresen had declared himself excited about the role, saying: “Getting killed in a horror film is every boy’s dream.”

From his marriage to his ex-wife, poet Susanna Roman, he had two children, Robyn and Elvin, who died at nine months of sudden infant death syndrome.