Swedish actor Björn Andrésen, known as ‘the most beautiful boy in the world’, dies at 70

When he was 15 years old, the actor was hired by Italian director Luchino Visconti, who was looking for a perfect young boy to play Tadzio, a teenager whose beauty is the object of obsession for the character played by Dirk Bogarde. ‘We learned from his daughter,’ said director Kristina Lindström, who, alongside Kristian Petri, directed a documentary about the Swedish actor’s life in 2021 called ‘The most beautiful boy in the world,’ his nickname after the film’s success. Andrésen’s role in the French-Italian co-production based on the German Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann’s book catapulted him to international fame. The perfect beauty image haunted him throughout his life, although the actor himself revealed how this experience plunged him into depression and drug addiction. ‘I had no problems during filming. But once it ended, I felt like I was a kind of bait thrown to the wolves. Physically, nothing happened to me, but it was still very unpleasant,’ he recounted years later. Andrésen was born on January 26, 1955, in Stockholm without a father. His mother committed suicide when he was ten years old, and he was then raised by his grandparents. In 2019, he appeared in ‘Midsommar,’ a horror film by Ari Aster, playing the role of elderly Dan.