2023-05-18 18:53:18
Known for his roles in “The Damned” or “Ludwig, the twilight of the gods”, Helmut Berger died on Thursday in Salzburg. He was 78 years old.
He had become over the years a figure of the jet-set lifestyle “sex, drugs and rock’n roll”. But he was first an unforgettable “Ludwig” in Luchino Visconti, his mentor and lover. Austrian actor Helmut Berger died Thursday at the age of 78 after burning his life at both ends. “I have lived three lives. And in four languages! I regret nothing!”, he said, mixing English and French, his agent recalled Thursday.
Helmut Berger, one of whose last screen appearances dates back to Saint Laurent by Bertrand Bonello in 2014, died “peacefully but suddenly in his hometown of Salzburg” in Austria, “shortly before his 79th birthday”.
Chance led him to Visconti
Before leading “la dolce vita all his life”, Helmut Berger was one of Visconti’s favorite actors, who noticed him for his incandescent beauty and entrusted him with roles of tormented aristocrats, which stuck to his skin.
In The Damned (1969), on the rise of Nazism, Helmut Berger disguises himself as Marlene Dietrich, in Ludwig, the twilight of the gods (1972), he is a dark Prince Louis of Bavaria with repressed homosexuality, alongside Romy Schneider replaying the character of Sissi, then a young gigolo in Violence and Passion (1974).
The meeting between the maestro and the Austrian Apollo took place in the mid-1960s on the set of Sandra, film by Visconti with Claudia Cardinale. Helmut Berger, then Helmut Steinberger, born May 29, 1944 in Bad Ischl (western Austria), is a waiter and model, following drama lessons. Finding himself by chance on the set in Italy, he caught the eye of Visconti who quickly made him one of his favorite actors.
Like a certain Alain Delon with whom he maintains a tenacious enmity. “I didn’t like how he behaved with Luchino, Nathalie (Delon) and Romy (Schneider). Everyone here forgave the French beauty god everything. But I know others, beauties: the David in Florence, he’s not bad either”, laughed Helmut Berger during from an interview with the French daily Liberation in 2015.
Addictions and convictions
Among his other roles, Helmut Berger also shot under the direction of Vittorio de Sica in The garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), on the rise of anti-Semitism in Italy, in an adaptation of Dorian Gray de Massimo Dallamano, dans A romantic Englishwoman by Joseph Losey…
But after Visconti’s death in 1976, he fell into alcohol and drugs. Apart from an appearance in the 3rd part of the Godfather in 1990, he now has few major roles and occupies the people pages for his addiction problems, his legal convictions and the story of his crazy evenings in Rome, where he lives. In 2007, he was awarded a Teddy (LGBT prize) for his entire career at the Berlinale.
“The favorite of all the international jet-set parties lived happy, satisfied and in a good state of mind in Salzburg until the end”, where he had returned to live, his agent Helmut Werner said in a statement on Thursday. .
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