Remembering the most handsome movie actor of the sixties and seventies

When a modern movie lover is asked to name the most handsome Western actor of the last century, they will almost certainly hear the answer - Alain Delon. Moreover, Delon's name has been constantly on everyone's lips in recent years due to the events that took place around him.

Therefore, justice simply requires us to name Helmut Berger, who died the year before last, and who would have turned 81 today. After Visconti's death, he hardly acted in films, unlike Delon, he was not involved in business (at least not successfully), and the scandals around him became fewer with age - so he passed away quietly and unnoticed.

But during the heyday of his acting career, they wrote about him in the West like this: "More intellectual than Alain Delon, and more impeccable than Robert Redford" (this was said about Berger by the great American film director Billy Wilder). Or, later, like this: "The man who once radiated more sex than Robert Pattinson and Leonardo DiCaprio." And this, as unusual as it may sound to the uninitiated, is the pure truth.

However, the most accurate definition of Berger in those years was also the shortest: "A man of breathtaking beauty." This beauty also captured one of the best directors in the history of world cinema, Luchino Visconti, for whom Berger became the same as Federico Fellini's Giulietta Masina, and Michelangelo Antonioni's Monica Vitti - an irreplaceable partner in film and in life. And in life - despite the difference in age of 38 years and origin: Visconti came from an ancient Italian aristocratic family, and Berger - from an ordinary bourgeois Austrian family.

At the same time, Visconti and Berger did not need any of the coming outs that are so popular today. Everyone knew that Visconti was homosexual and Berger was bisexual, at least in the world of cinema, and everyone considered it their personal business. But besides that, Visconti actually became a second father to Berger, to whom Helmut owed everything - as evidenced by his suicide attempt after Visconti's death.

Unlike Alain Delon, who was a universal actor, Berger was an actor whose advantage was his brilliant (in the acting sense of the word) acting on the edge of mental and physical health. But only Visconti could make him work like that, so after the director's death, his acting career faded, and later, due to his dissolute lifestyle (Berger slept with many "stars" of both sexes), his beauty faded too.

However, this image of “breathtaking beauty” will remain in the history of cinema forever.

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