There is a wonderful documentary by Cordula Kablitz-Post showing Helmut Berger returning to Ischia, showing Luchino Visconti’s castle and the cliffs and the bay where he once swam. In his old favorite bar, the landlord is happy, calls him “Maestro” and serves a lobster, Berger’s favorite meal. You can see Berger in his home village near Bad Ischl in Upper Austria and in a taxi in Rome, where a taxi driver remembers Visconti’s films with Helmut Berger. We see the regent of a vanished empire, that of cinema nobility and the jet set, of counts and dukes, of inherited fortunes, elegance and eccentricity.
Helmut Berger, born on May 29, 1944, loved rock’n’roll and boogie-woogie. His parents ran an inn, they had little time for the boy, who was to become a dentist or nurse. But he preferred to read and dream. Berger eloped: in 1964 he traveled to Switzerland, briefly to Paris and then to London, where he did not pass the drama school exam, but met Julie Christie, Ursula Andress and David Hemmings, who starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” in 1966 “ became famous. Berger worked as a waiter and photo model. In 1967 he got a small role in a film.
Then Luchino Visconti spotted this face for The Damned. Berger was set to play a Nazi, which he disliked – but his icy portrayal shaped nearly all future interpretations. From now on, Helmut Berger could no longer walk through Rome unrecognized: he was the most beautiful man in the world. Billy Wilder is credited with the quip that the best Italian actor is unfortunately an Austrian.
Visconti formed his lover, as Berger well recognized. He was blond, he didn’t like Wagner operas – but Visconti saw him as Ludwig II. And so in 1972 he played the crazy Bavarian king in Visconti’s biggest cloud cuckoo land alongside Romy Schneider. Two years later he was a bohemian in The House of an Old Scholar, Burt Lancaster, in The Passion – Visconti tells her story here.
The master director died in March 1976 while Berger was flying to friends in Rio de Janeiro. After hearing the news, he immediately returned to Rome. Allitalia took no money.
Helmut Berger noticed that the favorites stayed away from Visconti’s court. One avoided the former darling. “All the directors I would have liked to work with were dead,” he says in the documentary “My Life”. He never wanted to go to Hollywood. He then left to play the most disinterested portrayal of a beau on 1984’s Dynasty. He knew Linda Evans and Joan Collins from his time in London and spoke disparagingly of them. He liked John Forsythe: “He can stay as he is.”
Helmut Berger, the enfant terrible, became a diva, scandalous noodle and drunkard, cooked with Alfred Biolek, played with Christoph Schlingensief and spent a few days in the Australian jungle camp. He still visited his mother in the inn. He was a character like in a play by fellow countryman Thomas Bernhard.
In the film about his life, Helmut Berger has an unbelievable grandeur when he sits in this restaurant where nothing has changed since the 1970s. He knows he has changed.
And that the landlord is lying.
Helmut Berger died in his sleep on May 18, a few days before his 79th birthday.