This Sunday, December 1, 2024, the actor Niels Arestrup died at the age of 75 at his home in Ville-d'Avray (Hauts-de-Seine) according to his press secretary and his wife. Isabel Le Nouvel. Franco-Danish actor and director, he has established himself as one of the big names in French cinema. With three Césars for his roles in My heart stopped beating, A prophet et Quai d'Orsay.
Niels Arestrup: a career marked by excellence, a life marked by love
Behind the reserved actor, a discreet man fiercely protected his private life. In 2012, then aged 63, the actor welcomed Isabelle Le Nouvel with his wife two children, twinsafter ten years of living together. A late but overwhelming experience, which he described as real “adventure of life“.
“Yes, I have two babies, fraternal twins. It's a life adventure. To consider having children, I had to be very much in love, to arrive at a point in my existence where I was finally stabilized. Having a little boy and a little girl at my age is overwhelming. Maybe when you're younger, it has less of an effect, but for me, it's something astonishing.“he confided to Paris Match in 2014. These children, whom he called with tenderness “life, real“, represented his balance away from the spotlight.
“He surrounded himself with the love of his people until the end”
On December 1, 2024, Niels Arestrup died at the age of 75 following a long illness. It was his wife who announced the news: “I have the extreme pain of sharing the death of my husband, the immense actor Niels Arestrup, at the end of a courageous fight against illness.. He surrounded himself with the love of his people.”she said in a press release.
For his children, now aged 12, the missing man was much more than a cinema icon: he was a deeply loving father, who knew how to reorient his priorities when they were born. “I didn't want children, I was always stuck somewhere else, on tour, filming. At the beginning, these beings, very organic with the mother, impressed me, paralyzed me. And then, love came by itself”he recounted in the columns of Liberationa year ago.
A family and artistic legacy left behind
Niels Arestrup, described as a reserved and perfectionist man, found a source of peace and happiness in his family. By collaborating with his wife on artistic projects, such as the piece 88 times the infinite, he demonstrated that his two passions – family and theater – could coexist harmoniously.
His disappearance leaves a big void in the world of cinema, but it is above all his role as father and husband that will remain engraved in the hearts of those close to him. “I prefer to focus on my wife and children.”, confided the one who did not want to have children in his interview given to Paris Match. His twins, to whom he had bequeathed much more than a prestigious name, will be able to remember him as a man who, until the end, had found in the family “real life“.
