This post is also available in:
Italiano (Italian) 
Deutsch (German)
Having met by chance in Volterra in the mid-1960s, the Italian language student Helmut Berger, a young Austrian from Bad Ischl, and the famous director Luchino Visconti, in Etruria to shoot Sandra (1965), were from then on intended to influence each other’s lives and to remain together until the director’s death in 1976.
Forever together
Helmut Berger passed away, and he did so not without the controversy that, ever since his first meeting with Luchino Visconti, their story has always raised. “Peacefully, but unexpectedly, he has left us…” as the German press that first broke the news specified in the statement, even though putting Berger and “peacefully” in the same sentence is really a contradiction. “Devil and holy water”, the end of his life was an opportunity to retrace his exploits, from the catwalks to his film debut, but above all to bring to attention his relationship with Visconti, who died 47 years ago.
Having met by chance in Volterra in the mid-1960s, the Italian language student Helmut Berger, a young Austrian from Bad Ischl, and the famous director Luchino Visconti, in Etruria to shoot Sandra (1965), were from then on intended to influence each other’s lives and to remain together until the director’s death in 1976.
The troubled relationship that the two entered into paired, as a sequel, with the famous and talked-about affair between the director himself and Franco Zeffirelli, Visconti’s long-time set designer and partner, despite a thousand adversities. Adversities that would also be commonplace during the 10-year official engagement with Helmut Berger, as gentle as he was self-destructive in his most extreme behaviours.
Cast by the director with a role in the episodic film The Witches (1967), Helmut Berger achieved success and also discreet recognition by critics with the role of Martin von Essenbeck, the dark and irascible heir to an industrial empire in the drama The Damned (1969). In particular, the unscrupulous parody of Marlene Dietrich that he offers at the beginning of the film is an example not only of his acting qualities but also of the ambiguity that characterised the actor’s entire life. Ambiguity that, most likely, found in Luchino Visconti fertile ground. And indeed, it was to him that the role of reckless King Ludwig of Wittelsbach would be entrusted in the costume drama Ludwig (1973), alongside his countrywoman Romy Schneider, further proof of how certain characters, sad and paranoid, seemed perfectly suited to the now established Berger, more dissolute and wild than ever.
Despite the 40 years gap, their relationship unfolded like a rollercoaster ride, between high peaks and fearful downs, all connected to the Austrian actor’s reckless lifestyle. Visconti’s death, which occurred after his last collaboration in Conversation Piece (1974), with Helmut Berger once again playing a tormented and cynical young man, was followed by a period of absolute nihilism, in which he even came close to death by overdose.
Describing himself as ‘a 32-year-old widower’, the actor found himself practically alone, definitively entering that self-destructive cycle of pathological addictions, somehow stemmed and rebalanced by the love, both physical and cinematic, that the relationship between the director and one of his most iconic actors always maintained despite the ostracism shown by the noble Visconti family, who had always been hostile to young Helmut.
And even now that Berger has died, at the age of 79, in Salzburg, his wife Francesca Guidato, married in 1994, has had her say. Cause of death, cremation, will, truth: with such premises, the great Visconti would certainly have been able to make yet another masterpiece, perhaps about the life of Helmut Berger, controversial until the end and beyond.