With his glacial blue eyes, blade-like face and feline elegance, Helmut Berger, who has died aged 78, was one of the most ravishing and hypnotic actors in postwar European cinema, and a lingering presence even after his best days were behind him. He was also Vogue’s first male cover star; the magazine photographed him in 1970 alongside his then-girlfriend, the model Marisa Berenson, while he was simultaneously in a relationship with the director Luchino Visconti. Madonna, who featured him in her controversial 1992 coffee-table book Sex, cited among her influences “every movie that Visconti ever made starring Helmut Berger”.
The first of these films – and only Berger’s fourth screen appearance – was The Damned (1969), an unrestrainedly lurid melodrama charting the decline of a fictional family of industrialists, loosely based on the Krupps family, and the rise of nazism in early-1930s Germany. As Martin von Essenbeck, heir to a steel dynasty, Berger is first seen sitting astride a chair on stage at his grandfather’s birthday party, dressed as Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, singing “Children, this evening I’ll choose something for me / A man, a real man.” In blond wig, cocked silver hat, feather boa, stockings and suspenders, he tries unsuccessfully to persevere with his performance after it is interrupted by news of the burning of the Reichstag. Berger later received a photograph from Dietrich, on which she had written: “Who’s prettier? Love Marlene.”
Although the film’s star was Dirk Bogarde, the promotional poster reproduced the image of Berger in his Blue Angel drag, alongside an enticing tagline: “He was soon to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany.” Martin molests a young cousin, preys relentlessly on a neighbour’s daughter until the child hangs herself, then rapes his own mother (Ingrid Thulin). The film ends with him giving a Nazi salute over her corpse while infernal flames are superimposed over his face.
Berger stole the show, apparently to Bogarde’s chagrin. But there was reportedly no preferential treatment for him on the set of The Damned. “With Helmut Berger, [Visconti] was an absolute tyrant,” said Charlotte Rampling, another of the film’s stars. “He told Helmut every single thing to do. Everything. Every movement.”
Visconti directed Berger in two further films. In Ludwig (1973), the actor played Ludwig II, the 19th-century king of Bavaria who commissioned a string of castles and lavishly funded the composer Richard Wagner (played by Trevor Howard), before being declared insane. Barely recognisable with dark, receding hair, a demeanour ranging from skittish to saturnine, and teeth that rot in his mouth as the film proceeds, Berger evokes spiritual emptiness and desolation.
The movie was largely unloved. A three-hour cut was poorly received in the US; versions butchered in other ways, including one which was hacked down to two hours without the consent of its director, who had recently suffered a stroke, were exhibited elsewhere. Ludwig was finally restored to its full 238-minute glory in 1980, four years after Visconti’s death.
Though undeniably turgid, its qualities have been reappraised in recent years, along with Berger’s suitability for the part. Jonathan Romney noted in 2018 that the actor “embodies a certain gorgeous yet pointedly hollow Byronic magnificence”. Less kindly, David Thomson called the actor’s look “dead yet handsome” and lamented that Visconti had turned three films “into wilfully decadent studies of that face”.
The third and least impressive of these was Conversation Piece (1974). Its story of the bond between a retired art historian and a gigolo was widely read as a portrait of the director and his muse. Opposite Burt Lancaster, however, Berger could only seem like a stalactite. “I threw myself into the student movement deeper than most,” says his character, explaining his chequered past, though by this point the actor had the primped and rarefied air of someone who wouldn’t throw himself into anything dicier than a bubble bath.
He was born in Bad Ischl, Austria, to Hedwig and Franz Steinberger, who were hoteliers, but he did not meet his father, a prisoner of war, until he was three. Mistreated by him and expelled from a string of schools, he ran away to Switzerland in his teens and became a waiter, then took acting lessons in London.
He studied Italian at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, where he met Visconti in 1964. They soon began living together, usually in separate quarters to keep their relationship secret from the director’s staff. Berger would sneak out to bars and nightclubs after Visconti was asleep.
The director gave him a small role as a hotel page in his contribution to the portmanteau film The Witches (1967). He was well-cast in the lead in Massimo Dallamano’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, set in latter-day London (1970); and in Vittorio De Sica’s haunting The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (in the same year), he is a member of a wealthy, sequestered Jewish family in 1930s Ferrara who are in denial about the encroaching fascism.
In Ash Wednesday (1973), he seduces Elizabeth Taylor, who is trying to win back her husband (Henry Fonda). He was part of another love triangle, this time with Glenda Jackson and Michael Caine, in The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), directed by Joseph Losey and co-written by Tom Stoppard. It was back to the seamy territory of The Damned in Salon Kitty (1976), Tinto Brass’s cult film about a Nazi brothel.
Long before Visconti died in 1976, Berger had drifted into excess and addiction. He was given to chopping out lines of cocaine with a gold razor blade and snorting them through a gold straw specially made for him by Bulgari, which he wore on a chain around his neck. Though the couple had already separated, he became depressed after Visconti’s death, and nearly died from a drugs overdose.
He played a drug-addled playboy in nine episodes of the soap opera Dynasty between 1983 and 1984, and a murderous cosmetic surgeon in the grisly thriller Faceless (1988). Francis Ford Coppola cast him as a Vatican accountant who meets a sticky end in The Godfather Part III (1990). On set, he clashed with the film’s star, Al Pacino, who considered Berger’s English inadequate for the part.
He affectionately reprised one of his earlier roles in the gentle Ludwig 1881 (1993). In 1998, he published a candid autobiography, Me, which itemised his sexual escapades with stars including Rudolf Nureyev, Britt Ekland and Ursula Andress. Later roles included an elderly gay man taunted by fascist thugs in Initiation (2009) and a duke overseeing aristocratic debauchery in Liberty (2019).
In 2015, he was the subject of Helmut Berger, Actor, which the director John Waters chose as his favourite movie of that year. “Helmut Berger, now 71 and sometimes looking like [the novelist] Marguerite Duras, rants and raves in his ramshackle apartment while the maid dishes the dirt about his sad life,” Waters reported. “The rules of documentary access are permanently fractured here when our featured attraction takes off all his clothes on camera, masturbates and actually ejaculates. The Damned, indeed.”
Berger married the model Francesca Guidato in 1994, and separated from her shortly after.
• Helmut Berger (Steinberger), actor, born 29 May 1944; died 18 May 2023
