Category Archives: Child Abuse

A new film shows how actor Björn Andrésen was damaged by playing a teen object of desire in Visconti’s 1971 classic. Is child stardom any healthier now, asks Sophie Monks Kaufman.

Fifty years ago, the revered Italian director Luchino Visconti searched far and wide for a young boy to star as the embodiment of youthful beauty in his film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel, Death in Venice. The character, Tadzio, is the object of obsession for ageing composer Gustav von Aschenbach (played by a 50-year-old Dirk Bogarde). The child actor that impressed Visconti enough to play him – a character whose “face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture”, in the words of Mann – was 15-year-old Swede, Björn Andrésen.

However, while working with one of European cinema’s great directors when still a teenager may sound like a dream opportunity, it was anything but. A new documentary, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, tells the story of Andrésen in the aftermath of landing the role, exposing the inadequate care afforded to him on set and looking at how he then emerged into a queasy limelight as the child object of grown-up desire. The film also tells of the tragedies that befell Andrésen before and after Death in Venice spun his life off its axis. The Andrésen we meet today is haunted by experiences depicted in the documentary – and, it is clear that if Death of Venice isn’t the source of all his pain, then it has certainly contributed a lot of it. 

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