The actor, who was born in Montreuil-sous-bois, in Seine-Saint-Denis, on February 8, 1949, died on Sunday 1is December in the morning in Ville-d'Avray (Hauts-de-Seine), at the age of 75. This strong personality, of a reserved and uncompromising nature, capable of instilling terror through some of his characters, was born in a modest environment – worker father, typist mother – in a certain irony of history.
His father, Knud, of Danish nationality, had in fact fled his country invaded in April 1940 by Nazi troops. Here he is in France, the Germans on his heels. About to embark from Le Havre for the United States, he makes a detour to Paris, where love unexpectedly reaches out to him on a café terrace, in the form of Yvonne Turmel. He doesn't speak a word of French, but his escape will stop dead in Paris. And Niels will be born, in the immediate post-war period, from this somewhat miraculous love born in the fires of hell, and a fortiori by accident, his parents having each already had a child before him.
Young Niels is solitary, he tends to shield himself. He explained it again in 2019 at Monde : « I still have a little difficulty approaching others, even if things are easier now. The fact remains that my sensitivity comes in part from this particular emotion, solitude, which has served me a lot. Without her, I wouldn’t have done what I did.” The young man shortened his studies and, like his father in those of Yvonne, threw himself somewhat by chance into the arms of the theater, which he learned, like a host of actors of his generation, from Tania Balachova, a disciple by the playwright and theorist Constantin Stanislavski. He himself founded his own actor training school in 1988: the École du Passage.
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Member of a Belgian troupe in the 1960s, he spent the following decade searching for himself in projects that were polar opposites. Classic texts and modern repertoire, he explores both. He is cut out to embody troubled, opaque and paradoxical characters. In 1976, he was part of the adventure Gilles de Rais the Infamousa play by Roger Planchon. In 1978, he played in High Surveillancea text by the sulphurous Jean Genet. Chekhov, however, is the author who sticks to him the most; he performs him several times and, thanks to him, makes a remarkable appearance at the Bouffes du Nord.
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