Björn Andrésen


Björn Johan Andrésen was a Swedish actor and musician. He was best known for having played the 14-year-old Tadzio in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film adaptation of the 1912 Thomas Mann novella Death in Venice.

Early life

Andrésen was born on 26 January 1955 in Stockholm, Sweden where he was raised. His father, an artist, has never been identified and his mother, Barbro Elisabeth Andrésen, took her own life when he was ten years old. He was then brought up by his maternal grandparents. Part of his schooling was at a boarding school in Denmark. Andrésen attended Adolf Fredrik's Music School in Stockholm.

Career

Andrésen's initial exposure to the entertainment industry was heavily influenced by his maternal grandmother. Following his mother's death, she actively encouraged and pressured him to pursue acting and modelling jobs, motivated by a personal ambition to have a famous grandchild. Andrésen had appeared in only one film, En kärlekshistoria, at the time he was cast in Death in Venice, which gained him international recognition. Andrésen's role was as Tadzio, the Polish boy with whom the film's older protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach becomes obsessed. Film historian Lawrence J. Quirk commented in his study The Great Romantic Films that some shots of Andrésen "could be extracted from the frame and hung on the walls of the Louvre or the Vatican". Following the Cannes Film Festival a year after the premiere of Death in Venice, Andrésen received international headlines as "the most beautiful boy in the world".
Andrésen later described his discomfort with his role in Death in Venice and its director Luchino Visconti, stating that "when I watch it now, I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me." At the time of the film's release, rumours circulated in the United States that Andrésen was homosexual, which Andrésen emphatically denied. After the film's premiere, Visconti pressured Andrésen to attend a gay club, where he was made uncomfortable by the staring of adult men; Andrésen later described the experience as "hell".
Eager to dispel the rumours regarding his sexuality and to shed his "pretty boy" image, Andrésen avoided homosexual roles and parts which he felt would play off his good looks, and was irritated when Germaine Greer used a photograph of him on the cover of her book The Beautiful Boy without his permission.
After the release of Death in Venice, Andrésen spent an extended period of time in Japan where he became an instant cultural idol. His image was widely used in the youth market, leading him to work as a model in fashion magazines and his face appearing everywhere on billboards and in television commercials for products like Meiji chocolate. This intense commercial activity cemented his status as a key figure in the popular 'Bishōnen' aesthetic and also recorded several pop songs. Andrésen had a strong liking for Japan since then and visited the country again over the years. Andrésen's arrival in Tokyo has been described as being similar to The Beatles landing in the U.S. The young actor was met with mass hysteria and received an enormous amount of female attention.
Andrésen appeared in several other films. These include Smugglarkungen, Kojan, Pelicanman, and Midsommar.
In addition to being an actor, Andrésen was a professional musician, and had performed and toured regularly with the Sven Erics dance band. In 2021, Andrésen was the focus of The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, a documentary detailing his experiences post-fame after the premiere of Death in Venice.

Personal life and Death

Andrésen resided in Stockholm. He had a daughter in 1984, with his then-wife, poet Susanna Roman, with whom he was married from 1983 to 1987. Andrésen and Roman had a second child, a son named Elvin, who died of sudden infant death syndrome at nine months of age. Andrésen fell into a long depression following the death of his son. In an interview in 2020, Andrésen stated that he believed he would meet his son again "in the afterlife". Andrésen had two granddaughters: Lo and Nike.
Björn Andrésen died of cancer at a hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, on 25 October 2025 at the age of 70.

Filmography

Documentaries