With his glacial blue eyes, blade-like face and feline elegance, Helmut Berger, who has died aged 78, was one of the most ravishing and hypnotic actors in postwar European cinema, and a lingering presence even after his best days were behind him. He was also Vogue’s first male cover star; the magazine photographed him in 1970 alongside his then-girlfriend, the model Marisa Berenson, while he was simultaneously in a relationship with the director Luchino Visconti. Madonna, who featured him in her controversial 1992 coffee-table book Sex, cited among her influences “every movie that Visconti ever made starring Helmut Berger”.
The first of these films – and only Berger’s fourth screen appearance – was The Damned (1969), an unrestrainedly lurid melodrama charting the decline of a fictional family of industrialists, loosely based on the Krupps family, and the rise of nazism in early-1930s Germany. As Martin von Essenbeck, heir to a steel dynasty, Berger is first seen sitting astride a chair on stage at his grandfather’s birthday party, dressed as Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, singing “Children, this evening I’ll choose something for me / A man, a real man.” In blond wig, cocked silver hat, feather boa, stockings and suspenders, he tries unsuccessfully to persevere with his performance after it is interrupted by news of the burning of the Reichstag. Berger later received a photograph from Dietrich, on which she had written: “Who’s prettier? Love Marlene.”
