Died this Sunday at the age of 75, a monster of stage and cinema rewarded with three Césars and a Molière, Niels Arestrup is rightly hailed as the immense actor that he was. But he didn't leave only good memories to his peers…
The world of cinema and theater is in mourning after the announcement of the death of Niels Arestrup at the age of 75, this Sunday, December 1. Although he began his career on the big screen in 1973, he had to wait until the 2000s to receive his first César nominations. He won three statuettes for best supporting actor: in 2006, 2010 and 2014, respectively for The Beat My Heart Has Stopped, A Prophet and Quai d'Orsay. A great theater actor, he played in around forty plays, and won a Molière in 2020.
If the tributes are unanimous in saluting the memory of the great actor that he undoubtedly was, all of his peers have not, far from it, kept good memories of the man. On several occasions, Niels Arestrup has been accused of violence by partners.
“Unfortunately, I have nothing positive to say about the man”
In 1979, on the set of La Dérobade, he burst Miou Miou's eardrum. “She had a completely burst eardrum! I told her so, however, as if Daniel Duval who was directing the film, which had to be simulated, but she insisted on it, she wanted it to look real… The same day, I broke her coccyx Maria Schneider…” he recalled in a portrait interview that he gave to the daily newspaper Liberationin 2007.
“Unfortunately, I have nothing positive to say about the man. My memory of the theater partner remains a significant trauma” commented Isabelle Adjani, upon the announcement of Arestrup's death. If the actress expressed her condolences to the actor's family, she did not forget the slap he gave her in 1983… That year, she left the room Mademoiselle Julie by August Strindberg at the Edward VII Theater, in which she played with Niels Arestrup, who had slapped her.
The person concerned will deny it, explaining at first glance that it was she who was the first to slap him. But he will not be consistent in his statements. In 1999 in Télérama, he admitted to having slapped the actress, before returning to his statement two years later on the set of the talk show You can't please everyone hosted by Marc-Olivier Fogiel. Who pointed out the contradiction in his various statements on this subject. Did he or did he not give Isabelle Adjani a violent slap? “I don’t know, I must have been drunk.”
“I hate him and he knows why”
It's another story of a slap that tarnished her reputation in 1996. The actress Myriam Boyer, Clovis Cornillac's mother, was fired for “serious misconduct”while she starred alongside Arestrup in the play Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?for which the actor's company was responsible for the majority of the production.
If the play features a couple who tear each other apart during a violent domestic scene, Myriam Boyer accused Arestrup of having almost strangled her. Taking the matter to court, she thus recounted the sequence experienced :
“During the strangulation scene, I had to defend myself because he was squeezing my neck too tightly. Then, during a tender scene where I held out my arm to him, he twisted it around my neck. so much so that I struggled. When I complained, Niels Arestrup said that I had slapped him. As he is a co-producer of the show, he had started to destabilize me long before. wanted me to break down, because he can't stand having an actress in front of him who exists.” Myriam Boyer won her case in court, obtaining 800,000 francs in damages.
In this context, we can better understand the words of Clovis Cornillacwhile he came to promote Belle et Sébastien 3 at the microphone of Europe 1, in the show Hello France hosted by Daphné Bürki. Asked to comment on Arestrup's nomination for the 2018 César for Best Supporting Role in Goodbye Up, Cornillac said:
“I hate this man. He's one of the rare ones… but he knows why, no problem”. Continuing a little further: “There are people who behave badly and people who behave badly, in general, they are people I don't like…”
