French actor Niels Arestrup died on Sunday at the age of 75 at his home in Ville-d'Avray, in the Paris region, his press secretary and his wife announced to AFP. “I have the extreme pain of announcing the death of my husband, the immense actor Niels Arestrup, at the end of a courageous fight against illness. He passed away surrounded by the love of his family,” wrote in a press release his wife, Isabelle Le Nouvel.
Figure in Jacques Audiard's films (“To Beat My Heart Stopped” in 2005 and “A Prophet” in 2009, which each time earned him a César – the most prestigious prize in French cinema – for best supporting role ), in 2016 he also played one of the main roles in the political fiction series “Baron noir”. In 2014, he also won a third César for best supporting role for “Quai d'Orsay”, an adaptation of a comic strip on French diplomacy, as well as a Molière in 2020, a prestigious French theater award.
Passionate about theater
Niels Arestrup owed his name to a Danish father who attempted to emigrate to the United States but stopped in France to get married. He grew up in a very modest environment in the Paris region. “You can imagine that as the son of a worker in Bagnolet in the 1950s, the show, the theater, the cinema, it was something that did not enter into my thoughts at all,” he told Le Figaro in 2021.
But he became passionate about theater by taking lessons with the French actress Tania Balachova. He remained faithful to the stage for almost half a century and largely rejected celebrity. “When I started in the profession, theater directors chose a play, then they asked themselves the question of distribution. Now, it's the opposite: we look for a star and, only after that, the play that could go with it”, he lamented in Le Monde in 2019. With his wife, he had twins born in 2012.
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