Helmut Berger, a handsome Austrian film star best known for appearing in three feature films by Italian neorealist director Luchino Visconti, his lover for ten years, passed away at his home in Salzburg on Thursday. He turned 78.
His death was announced by his agent, Helmut Werner, who gave no cause.
“Many years ago,” Mr. Werner said in a statement, “Helmut Berger told me, ‘I lived three lives. And in four languages! Je ne sorryte rien.’”
Mr. Berger was studying Italian in Perugia in 1964 when a friend introduced him to Mr. Visconti, who was directing a film on location starring Claudia Cardinale.
“I was there watching, I was fascinated,” he told the Europe of Cultures website in 1988. “I wanted to see how they made a movie.”
Soon after, they began a relationship, both personal and professional. Mr. Visconti cast Mr. Berger in “The Damned” (1969), the story of a German steel family, inspired by the Krupps, in the early years of the Third Reich.
As Martin, the grandson of the patriarch of the family, Mr. Berger impersonates Marlene Dietrich in full costume at a party for his grandfather, which ends with the report of a fire in the Reichstag. Martin later molests younger relatives and rapes his mother (Ingrid Thulin).
Ann Guarino, reviewing the film for The Daily News of New York, said Mr. Berger personified the “downright perversion” of Nazism. Vincent Canby of DailyExpertNews wrote that Mr. Berger “gives the performance of the year in my opinion”. He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Male Newcomer.
Mr. Berger said working with Mr. Visconti was like being on stage.
“You don’t shoot 10 minutes or five minutes, but whole scenes, sometimes 20 minutes long,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1970. “He uses three cameras, so you never know which one is on you. You go there into the whole atmosphere, He doesn’t limit you, He wants you to be free.”
Mr. Berger starred in two more feature films directed by Mr. Visconti: “Ludwig” (1973), playing the crazy 19th-century King of Bavaria, for which he won a David di Donatello Award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar; and “Conversation Piece” (1974), starring Burt Lancaster as a quietly Rome-dwelling art historian whose life is changed by several people, including a pushy marchesa and her gigolo lover, played by Mr. Berger.
Mr Canby this time had a radically different assessment of Mr Berger’s work, calling him “a lightweight” who can “function no more than as an ideogram for decadence”.
Mr. Berger and Mr. Visconti had already been living together for some time.
“During the 12 years with Luchino Visconti, I was faithful,” he told Gala magazine in 2012.
“But were you dating model Marisa Berenson at the time?” asked the magazine’s interviewer.
“Of course I’m bisexual,” he said. “This is no problem.”
Mr. Berger fell into a deep depression after the death of Mr. Visconti in 1976.
“At first I drank a lot, gluckgluckgluck, and then the pills came,” he told Gala. “My housekeeper wasn’t supposed to come until 5 p.m., but happened to come over at 10 a.m. and rescued me.”
Helmut Berger was born Helmut Steinberger on May 29, 1944 in Bad Ischl, Austria. His parents, Hedwig and Franz Steinberger, ran a hotel.
Fleeing from his father, who he believed was cruel to him, Helmut moved first to England and then to Italy, where he made his screen debut in “The Witches” (1967), an anthology film consisting of five stories, each created by a other director. He played a hotel page in the segment directed by Mr. Visconti.
After a few other films, including ‘The Damned’, Mr. Berger landed the title role in Massimo Dallamano’s ‘Dorian Gray’ (1970), which billed itself as a ‘modern allegory’ based on Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian’. Gray’ set in today’s sexy London. He was one of reportedly 500 actors who auditioned.
Mr. Berger “gives a trance-like performance, just looks gorgeous – if you like the type,” Ms. Guarino wrote.
Until a few years ago he continued to work, mainly in Europe. He most notably played the ailing son of a wealthy Jewish family facing fascism in Italy in Vittorio De Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1970), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and the playboy who Elizabeth Taylor’s character seduces after she has cosmetic surgery in “Ash Wednesday” (1973).
He also portrayed Fallon Carrington’s (Pamela Sue Martin) millionaire boyfriend in ‘Dynasty’, the prime-time soap opera, in a storyline from 1983 to 1984, and the Vatican’s chief accountant, who tries to swindle Michael Corleone, in ‘The Godfather III” (1990).
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Berger was known for his jet set lifestyle, being photographed by Andy Warhol, being associated with women like Bianca Jagger and being called “the most beautiful man in the world” in the German media.
But when Gala interviewed him after the publication of the book ‘Helmut Berger: A Life in Pictures’, he said he was no longer looking for the social buzz of his former life.
“I’ve been through everything,” he said. “I don’t feel like Helmut Berger either; I’m not him. It’s a stage name. My name is Helmut Steinberger. And I will remain so until I am dead.”
