Björn Johan Andrésen (born 26 January 1955) is a Swedish actor and musician. He is best known for playing the 14-year-old Tadzio in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film adaptation of the 1912 Thomas Mann novella Death in Venice. He also played a minor role in Ari Aster's 2019 folk horror film Midsommar. Early life Andrésen's father has never been identified and his mother, Barbro Elisabeth Andrésen, took her own life when he was 10 years old. He was then brought up by his maternal grandparents. Part of his schooling was at a boarding school in Denmark. As a student Andrésen attended the Adolf Fredrik's Music School in Stockholm. Career Andrésen had only appeared in one film, En kärlekshistoria (1970), at the time he was cast in Death in Venice, which gained him international recognition. Andrésen's role was as Tadzio, the beautiful young Polish boy with whom the film's older protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach (played by Dirk Bogarde) becomes obsessed. Film historian Lawrence J. Quirk commented in his study The Great Romantic Films (1974) that some shots of Andrésen "could be extracted from the frame and hung on the walls of the Louvre or the Vatican". Following the Cannes Film Festival a year after the premiere of Death in Venice, Andrésen received international headlines as "the most beautiful boy in the world". Andrésen later described his discomfort with his role in Death in Venice and its director Luchino Visconti, stating that "When I watch it now, I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me." At the time of the film's release, rumours circulated in the United States that Andrésen was gay (as the role demanded that he appear to exchange romantic glances with the protagonist, and on another occasion, be kissed and caressed by another teenage boy), which Andrésen emphatically denied. After the film's premiere, Visconti pressured Andrésen to attend a gay club, where he was made uncomfortable by the staring of adult men; Andrésen later described the experience as "hell". Eager to dispel the rumours regarding his sexuality and to shed his "pretty boy" image, Andrésen avoided homosexual roles and parts which he felt would play off his good looks, and was irritated when feminist writer Germaine Greer used a photograph of him on the cover of her book The Beautiful Boy (2003) without his permission. Greer consulted photographer David Bailey (who owned the copyright for the image) before