In the 1970’s Sweden’s Bjorn Andrésen was dubbed ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’ when appeared in the 1971 film Death in Venice. Andrésen passed away this week at the age of 70.
Andrésen’s story was shared in the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World that played at the 2021 Revelation International Film Festival.
Director Luchino Visconti set out to bring Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice to the screen. The story, set at the turn of the century, follows composer Gustav von Aschenbach who is mesmerised by an attractive youth he encounters amongst the holidaying families in Venice.
While actor Dirk Bogarde was cast as the composer, Visconti travelled the world searching for a suitably beautiful actor to play the adolescent Tadzio. Behind the scenes footage from the casting process sees the director talk about how her has scoured Russia and Poland and many other countries for a youth who is so beautiful to warrant the fascination of the central character.
In Stockholm they discover 15 year old Bjorn Andresen, he’s grown up modeling and already made one Swedish film.
When the finished film is premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Andresen is proclaimed to be “the most beautiful boy in the world”. Immediately he is thrust into a world of gay nightclubs, drinking and celebrity. Fan mail arrives by the sack, and he has a legion of fans, particularly gay men, but he’s also huge in Japan.
He travels to Japan where he records pop singles, his face is the basis from manga characters, and he’s a pin-up heartthrob appearing in advertisements and being mobbed by fans.
In their documentary filmmaker Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri tracked down Andrésen five decades later and found him living in squalor in a Stockholm apartment. The filmmakers follow him as he discussed his memories of making the film and being exposed to celebrity at a young age, and he goes on a journey to slowly unravel the events of his life that caused him years of depression and mental health issues.
He spoke about how he disliked being presented as a homosexual object of desire and later in his career he shunned any roles that traded on his good looks or featured any gay characters.
He appeared in a steady stream of Swedish productions over the years and had a memorable small part in the 2019 film Midsommar.
