"Bjorn Andresen, the beautiful Tadzio from Death in Venice, tells Matt Seaton why he is furious about being on the cover of Germaine Greer's new book"

Bjorn Andresen has only seen the cover of Germaine Greer's new book, but he is not very happy about it. The reason is that Andresen is - or rather, was - the boy whose image adorns the front cover of The Boy, Greer's characteristically feisty combination of art history and coffee-table erotica.

In 1970, the 15-year-old Andresen played Tadzio in Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti's adaptation of a Thomas Mann story. Overnight, Andresen became a celebrity, adored as the ethereally beautiful, blond-locked boy who becomes a fatal object of desire for Gustav von Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde. But not just for him.

"The boy is the missing term in the discussions of the possibility of a female gaze," remarks Greer in her book. But ever since his appearance in Visconti's film Andresen has felt the scrutiny of both male and female gazes. The use of his image on The Boy is just one more unwelcome instance, he says: "I have a feeling of being utilised that is close to distasteful."

His objection is partly moral, he explains, talking from his home in Stockholm. "Adult love for adolescents is something that I am against in principle," he says. "Emotionally perhaps, and intellectually, I am disturbed by it - because I have some insight into what this kind of love is about."

His experience of "this kind of love" began at the Cannes film festival in 1970, where Visconti's film first became a sensation. "I was just 16," Andresen relates, "and Visconti and the team took me to a gay nightclub. Almost all the crew were gay. The waiters at the club made me feel very uncomfortable. They looked at me uncompromisingly as if I was a nice meaty dish.

"I knew I couldn't react," he says. "It would have been social suicide. But it was the first of many such encounters."

Andresen is adamant that he is not in the least homophobic - "I spend too much time with gay people to be" - but the tag of "most beautiful boy in the world" dogged him wherever he went. Not that his admirers were all men, by any means. On the back of his success with Death in Venice, Andresen was persuaded by his grandmother to go to Japan, where the film had been a big hit. It was she who had first applied to an advert in Sweden for film parts for children - "She felt I was so talented and should be world famous, you know how it is," he says drily. She certainly got her wish: in the space of a few weeks, he recorded two pop songs and appeared in several commercials. When Andresen performed in Japan, he found himself mobbed by girls: "You've seen the pictures of the Beatles in America? It was like that. There was a hysteria about it."

Andresen's true love was music. After school, he applied to study at music college, but didn't get in. Instead, he took piano lessons privately with one of Sweden's most highly regarded teachers. His ambition, after his return from Japan, was to start a Duke Ellington-style big band. But he found himself under pressure to take other film parts. He spent a year in Paris waiting for Malcolm Leigh to start shooting a film called How Lovely Are the Messengers, which was then never made. "I can summarise my career in one word," he says. "Chaos."

He moved to Copenhagen for a year, to be with a girlfriend, but also in an attempt to find some anonymity. But his role as Tadzio continued to haunt him. "The worst thing of all," he says, "is that no one pays attention to your ambitions, your dreams or who you really are." He was merely expected to be beautiful, that was all.

"I remember playing the first movement from Liszt's E flat major concerto for a party at a friend's house - a well-known Swedish composer, Karl-Erik Welin," he recalls. "People applauded at the end; it was no big deal. But then this young woman in a suit came forward and said, 'Wow! You can actually do something!'"

Being immortalised as a beautiful boy was not a blessing, but a curse. "I felt like an exotic animal in a cage," he says. And because it happened so early in his life, it distorted all his experience for years afterwards. "Even today," he says, "I don't know how to flirt. When you have only to snap your fingers... there's a lot of social training you miss out on as a celebrity."

Isn't it strange, then, that he should find himself just now appropriated as an object of desire by a famous feminist? Wasn't part of feminism's original protest against precisely such "objectification"?

"It is ironic, yes," Andresen remarks. He has spent most of his adult life seeking to be invisible, just one of the crowd. Has he ever been tempted to alter his appearance?

"Not only my appearance, but my whole identity," he says, with feeling. Finally, now, at the age of 48, he bears sufficiently small resemblance to the 15-year-old version of himself. "Kind, elderly women still seem to recognise me, but I've been working hard to reach anonymity."

Today, he describes himself as being between jobs, but hopes that the band he plays keyboards for, Sven-Erics, which has been around in different line-ups since the 60s, still has life in it. In the early 80s, after his girlfriend became pregnant, Andresen finally went to theatre college, which led to a job running a small theatre in Stockholm, doing everything from directing, to lighting and dishwashing. It was perhaps the most satisfying period of his life: "You can imagine how good it felt to turn down film work."

Since then Andresen has survived the death of one of his children in infancy, and "the inevitable divorce". He has even resumed his acting career recently, though strictly only on the stage (in a Tennessee Williams play). Almost to his surprise, he found he loved it - because it felt like his choice. "I have to fight these days, just like anyone else," he says, "which actually feels quite all right."

Sometimes he still sees his image as Tadzio in a poster or in a cinema flyer; it used to cause him irritation, but not any more. "My career is one of the few that started at the absolute top and then worked its way down," he says. "That was lonely."

But as for Greer's The Boy, the issue still rankles. "She, or the publisher, might have asked me beforehand," he observes.

Yes, but if they had, would he have given his permission?

"Of course not. Not until hell freezes over."

Source: Guardian
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