You get the feeling this disguise, like his dilapidated surroundings, is due to neglect, but also a deliberate retreat from life, perhaps to escape the present as much as the past. If these were stripped away, you’d see signs of his chiseled youth, despite the passing years. Yet the ghostly figure that haunts the current film and revisits Venice is not the flawless teenager preserved by cinema, but a 65-year-old man, ravaged and older than his years, living in an infested flat in Sweden from which the authorities are threatening to evict him.Īndrésen is now tall and painfully thin with long silver hair and a matching beard that belong on Merlin, or Patti Smith.

Visconti’s description, ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in The World’, is now the title of an impressive documentary that uses revealing behind-the-scenes footage shot during the making of the film, and captures Andrésen’s brief, intense moment in the spotlight. There’s an androgyny a skinny physique attributable to the meager diet of the time the shaggy hair and sculptured face of a 1970s pop star which, following the release of the film, he was for a short time – in Japan. The description of Tadzio set the bar high when it came to casting: ‘His face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture - pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-colored ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity.’Īndrésen’s looks are actually more in keeping with the decade about to descend. On page and screen Tadzio is a distant, mute figure playing with his siblings, and returning the lascivious gaze of Aschenbach. Andrésen, with virtually no acting experience and little ambition to develop any, clearly had something. Visconti finally found 15-year-old Björn Andrésen in Stockholm.Īlain Delon said that if Visconti recruited you for a role, it was because he knew what he would be getting, even if you didn’t. It was a search that had eluded the other major directors who had attempted to bring the book to the screen: John Huston, Joseph Losey, Franco Zeffirelli. For years the director trawled the Continent in pursuit of the right actor for the part. Less is known of the teenager who played the role in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film of Mann’s novel. He was a Polish boy the writer ogled from a distance in 1911 while holidaying with his wife at the Grand Hotel des Bains in Venice. The inspiration for the object of Aschenbach’s infatuation in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was acknowledged by the author some years after publication, and the subject of a biography a century later ( The Real Tadzio by Gilbert Adair).

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