Björn Andrésen

Björn Johan Andrésen (26 January 1955 – 25 October 2025) was a Swedish actor and musician. He was best known for having played the 14-year-old Tadzio in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film adaptation of the 1912 Thomas Mann novella Death in Venice.

Andrésen was born on 26 January 1955 in Stockholm, Sweden where he was raised. His father, an artist, died when Andrésen was two years old. His mother, Barbro Elisabeth Andrésen, took her own life when he was ten years old. He was then brought up by his maternal grandparents. Part of his schooling was at a boarding school in Denmark. Andrésen attended Adolf Fredrik's Music School in Stockholm.

Andrésen's initial exposure to the entertainment industry was heavily influenced by his maternal grandmother. Following his mother's death, she actively encouraged and pressured him to pursue acting and modelling jobs, motivated by a personal ambition to have a famous grandchild. Andrésen had only previously appeared in one film, En kärlekshistoria (1970), when he was cast in Death in Venice, which gained him international recognition. Andrésen's role was as Tadzio, the 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 was referred to in newspaper headlines as "the most beautiful boy in the world".