Helmut Berger, Actor Known for His Work With Visconti, Dies at 78

Helmut Berger, a good-looking Austrian film star who was finest recognized for showing in three function movies by the Italian neorealist director Luchino Visconti, his lover for a dozen years, died on Thursday at his house in Salzburg. He was 78.

His demise was introduced by his agent, Helmut Werner, who didn’t give a trigger.

“Many years ago,” Mr. Werner mentioned in an announcement, “Helmut Berger told me, ‘I have lived three lives. And in four languages! Je ne regrette rien.’”

Mr. Berger was learning Italian in Perugia in 1964 when a buddy launched him to Mr. Visconti, who was on location directing a movie that starred Claudia Cardinale.

“I was there watching, I was fascinated,” he advised the web site Europe of Cultures in 1988. “I wanted to see how they shot a film.”

They started a relationship quickly after that, private in addition to skilled. Mr. Visconti solid Mr. Berger in “The Damned” (1969), the story of a German metal household, impressed by the Krupps, within the early years of the Third Reich.

As Martin, the grandson of the household’s patriarch, Mr. Berger imitates Marlene Dietrich in full costume throughout a celebration for his grandfather, which ends with phrase of a hearth on the Reichstag. Martin later molests youthful family and rapes his mom (Ingrid Thulin).

Ann Guarino, reviewing the film for The Daily News of New York, mentioned Mr. Berger personified the “outright perversion” of Nazism. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Berger “gives, I think, the performance of the year.” He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for many promising male newcomer.

Mr. Berger mentioned that working with Mr. Visconti was like being onstage.

“You don’t do 10-minute, five-minute takes but whole scenes, sometimes 20 minutes long,” he advised The Los Angeles Times in 1970. “He uses three cameras so you never know which one is on you. You get really into it, the whole atmosphere. He doesn’t limit you, he wants you to be free.”

Mr. Berger appeared in two extra function movies directed by Mr. Visconti: “Ludwig” (1973), wherein he performed the mad Nineteenth-century king of Bavaria, for which he received a David di Donatello Award, the Italian equal of the Oscar; and “Conversation Piece” (1974), which starred Burt Lancaster as an artwork historian residing quietly in Rome whose life is modified by a number of individuals, together with a pushy marchesa and her gigolo lover, performed by Mr. Berger.

Mr. Canby had a radically completely different evaluation of Mr. Berger’s work this time, calling him “a lightweight” who “can function no more than as an ideogram for decadence.”

By then, Mr. Berger and Mr. Visconti had been residing collectively for a while.

“During the 12 years with Luchino Visconti, I was faithful,” he advised Gala journal in 2012.

“But were you dating model Marisa Berenson at the time?” the journal’s interviewer requested.

“Of course, I’m bisexual,” he mentioned. “This is not a problem.”

Mr. Berger fell right into a deep despair after Mr. Visconti’s demise in 1976.

“At first I drank a lot, gluckgluckgluck, and then the pills came,” he advised Gala. “My housekeeper wasn’t supposed to come until 5 p.m. but happened to drop by at 10 a.m. and saved me.”

Helmut Berger was born Helmut Steinberger on May 29, 1944, in Bad Ischl, Austria. His mother and father, Hedwig and Franz Steinberger, ran a resort.

Fleeing his father, who he mentioned was brutal to him, Helmut moved first to England after which to Italy, the place he made his movie debut in “The Witches” (1967), an anthology film consisting of 5 tales, every made by a distinct director. He performed a resort web page within the section directed by Mr. Visconti.

After a couple of different movies, together with “The Damned,” Mr. Berger was solid within the title function of Massimo Dallamano’s “Dorian Gray” (1970), which billed itself as a “modern allegory” based mostly on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” set in horny present-day London. He was certainly one of a reported 500 actors who auditioned.

Mr. Berger “gives a trance-like performance, looking simply beautiful — if you like the type,” Ms. Guarino wrote.

He continued to work, principally in Europe, till a couple of years in the past. He notably performed the sickly son of a wealthy Jewish household going through Fascism in Italy in Vittorio De Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1970), which received the Oscar for finest foreign-language movie, and the playboy who seduces Elizabeth Taylor’s character after she undergoes beauty surgical procedure in “Ash Wednesday” (1973).

He additionally portrayed the millionaire boyfriend of Fallon Carrington (Pamela Sue Martin) on “Dynasty,” the prime-time cleaning soap, in a narrative arc from 1983 to 1984, and the Vatican’s chief accountant, who tries to swindle Michael Corleone, in “The Godfather III” (1990).

Information about survivors was not instantly obtainable.

Mr. Berger was recognized for his jet-setting lifestyle, for being photographed by Andy Warhol, for being linked to girls like Bianca Jagger, and for being known as “the most beautiful man in the world” within the German media.

But when Gala interviewed him after the publication of the ebook “Helmut Berger: A Life in Pictures,” he mentioned he was now not looking for his earlier life’s social hustle and bustle.

“I’ve experienced everything,” he mentioned. “I don’t feel like Helmut Berger, either; I’m not him. It’s a stage name. My name is Helmut Steinberger. And that’s what I’ll be until I’m dead.”