2023-05-18 14:43:59
He was his own best enemy
Helmut Berger died in Salzburg at the age of 78
Quelle: picture alliance / akg-images
At the height of his fame, in the 1970s, he was considered the most beautiful man in the world, which was difficult to imagine in the last decades of his life. Bloated on alcohol and drugs, stammering and still enchanted by his own brilliance. The proverbial car accident you can’t look away from.
An Ascension Day, the Austrian actor Helmut Berger “passed away gently” at the age of 78 in his hometown of Salzburg at 4 a.m., according to his agency.
After an apprenticeship in a hotel, Berger first moved to London, where he made his living as a model and took acting lessons. Then he moved to Rome, then the center of European filmmaking, and met the much older director Luchino Visconti. The two became a couple, and Berger shot his most important films with him. In “The Damned” from 1969 he played the dazzling son of an industrialist family involved with the Nazis and in one scene he parodied the appearance of Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel”. What prompted his compatriot Billy Wilder to say: “Apart from Helmut Berger, there are no more interesting women these days.”
In “Violence and Passion” from 1974, he embodies the lover of an upper-class wife who moves into the house of a reclusive older professor with her children and whirls his life upside down. Basically, it’s Visconti’s bittersweet portrait of the love of his life: Berger is gorgeous, wears only Yves Saint Laurent, is on the phone all the time, and is involved in shady dealings. A guy you have to fall for, even if it means trouble. According to Berger, he took cocaine for the first time in 1971, in the Roman nightclub “Number One”, had numerous affairs and lived an excessive life. After Visconti’s death in 1976 and a dispute over will and inheritance, he lost his footing and his career stagnated. He starred in a few episodes of the series Denver Clan in the 1980s, but his biggest appearances continued to be as a rambling caricature of himself on talk shows.
He was “rediscovered” time and again: by Christoph Schlingensief for the film “The 120 Days of Bottrop”, by the band Blumfeld for a music video, by the director Peter Kern for the film “Blood Friendship”, he even let him into the “jungle camp”. present themselves briefly.
With the world at his feet, Berger played the hero of the novel Dorian Gray (1970) and the Bavarian King Ludwig II (1873): dazzling men for whom reality is not enough. Two guys like him.
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