STOCKHOLM - There are faces that define an era, and then there are faces that haunt it. Björn Johan Andrésen, the Swedish actor and musician whose appearance in Death in Venice (1971) transfixed the world, has died at 70. The news of his passing on October 25, 2025, was confirmed by Swedish media; no cause has been announced.
By Allan R. Ellenberger - The Hollywoodland Revue
For those who first encountered him on-screen through the eyes of Luchino Visconti—the blond boy on the Lido, coming of age and blissfully unaware that he had just been made into an immortal symbol—the idea that Andrésen, for a long time, has never been allowed to age in our collective imagination is not altogether surprising. He had been turned into something unwilling, something inhuman: an ideal made flesh. The angelic muse. The beautiful, unobtainable dream. The boy too perfect to be real.
A Sudden Immortality
Andrésen was born in Stockholm on January 26, 1955, and raised mostly by his grandmother, following the disappearance and later death of his mother under circumstances that remained a mystery to him. At the age of 15, he was discovered by Visconti to play the role of Tadzio in Death in Venice, the pallid Polish boy whose beauty rouses in an aging composer a deep and forbidden longing.
The role made Andrésen an overnight international sensation. Death in Venice premiered in 1971, drawing praise and controversy in equal measure; its somber beauty, and its unflinching depiction of obsession, solidified Andrésen as an icon of fleeting, doomed innocence. Visconti called him “the most beautiful boy in the world”—a description that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Despite starring in a few more films and appearing in television projects in later years—including a memorable scene in Midsommar (2019)—Andrésen would never truly outrun the shadows of that summer in Venice. “Death in Venice screwed up my life,” he would say in later years, not with resentment or vitriol, but with a weary acceptance of a fate already sealed.
The Man Behind the Myth
That such fame arrived so early in his life, and with such unyielding force, is not lost on him either. Andrésen’s teenage years were spent at the mercy of others—filmmakers, photographers, journalists—all demanding a piece of him and the beautiful boy he had become. In Japan, where the film was hugely popular, Andrésen was made a cult icon, an idol whose death was rumored for years, even decades. A “bishōnen,” he would be called in Japanese—a delicate, androgynous archetype that has since proliferated across manga and anime. But the real Björn, behind the camera, was searching for something else: not perfection, but for some semblance of peace.
Music became his solace, allowing him to reinvent himself as a pianist and composer with a local band, Sven Erics. He settled down, raising a family with his wife as he weathered personal tragedies (including the death of his infant son). Andrésen lived, as he said, as an “ordinary citizen” for most of his life, far from the flashbulbs and spotlights.
His story was revisited in 2021 with the release of the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, where Andrésen finally had the opportunity to speak on his own behalf. The film gave him a second chance at reclaiming his narrative; as the viewer, we bear witness to the frail, wounded, yet quietly dignified man who sits before the camera and, decades after the fact, still struggles with the weight of having been made into a myth. “I’ve been carrying that boy on my shoulders for fifty years,” Andrésen confesses in the film, “and he’s heavier than he looks.”