Andrésen had only appeared in one film, "En kärlekshistoria" (1970) at the time he was cast in "Death in Venice", which gained him international recognition. While the film performed relatively poorly at the box office, Andrésen was noted for his performance as Tadzio, the beautiful young Polish boy with whom the film's older protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach (played by Dirk Bogarde) becomes obsessed. Film historian Lawrence J. Quirk commented in his study "The Great Romantic Films" (1974) that some shots of Andrésen "could be extracted from the frame and hung on the walls of the Louvre or the Vatican." Following the Cannes Film Festival a year after the premiere of Death in Venice, Andrésen became widely known in international headlines as "the most beautiful boy in the world".