HELMUT BERGER ‘The Most Beautiful Man In the World’ and longtime lover of Luchino Visconti dies aged 78

Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who was both incredibly handsome and talented was made into a major star in European cinema by auteur filmmaker Luchino Visconti who also became his boyfriend albeit there was a 40-year age difference.   Visconti cast Berger in a spectacular role in his landmark 1969 epic The Damned in which he played Martin von Essenbeck, a scion of a wealthy industrial family who struggled for control over the business in interwar Germany as the Nazis rise to power.  For the film, Berger famously performed in drag as Marlene Dietrich and was subsequently nominated for a Golden Globe for most promising male newcomer.

Next up was an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and then he was cast in Vittorio de Sica’s 1970 masterwork The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Visconti cast Berger in another signature role in a biopic of Bavaria’s eccentric 19th-century King Ludwig II. Then he reunited again with Visconti for Conversation Piece, released in 1974, in which he starred opposite Burt Lancaster in a drama inspired by his and Visconti’s relationship; in the same period he played one of his many playboy-gigolo characters opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda in Ash Wednesday, and another opposite Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson in The Romantic Englishwoman. In the Tinto Brass-directed Salon Kitty, he returned to the combination of sleaze and Nazism as an SS man who sets up a brothel for spying purposes.

After Visconti’s death in 1976,  Berger struggled and tried to commit suicide but was found in time to be saved. Drug and alcohol abuse began to shadow his acting career.  He did end up in the TV series Dynasty as Fallon Carrington’s sleazy fiance Peter De Vilbis, who dies in a plane crash. (he said he did it only for money. “crying on the way to the set but laughing on the way to the bank”.)  Later in the 1989 incarnation of Yves Saint Laurent in the 2014 biopic of the fashion designer directed by Bertrand Bonello, and his final role in Albert Serra’s 2019 film Liberté, in which he plays an 18th-century aristocrat who organizes a night of outdoor debauchery. 

At the height of his fame In the late 1960s and 1970s, bisexual Berger was seen as the “it boy of the European jet set“.According to his 1998 autobiography Ich. Die Autobiographie, the actor’s affairs included flings with Rudolf Nureyev, Britt Ekland, Ursula Andress, Nathalie Delon, Tab Hunter, Florinda Bolkan, Linda Blair, Marisa Mell, Anita Pallenberg, Marilù Tolo, Jerry Hall, and both Bianca and Mick Jagger. Miguel Bosé writes about his affair with Berger in his autobiography.

Berger “passed away peacefully but unexpectedly” in Salzburg, the city where he grew up aged 78.