NIELS ARESTRUP

(8 February 1949 - 1 December 2024)

The Franco-Danish actor, film director and writer, Niels Arestrup, who has died aged 75, performed in over forty stage productions from 1970 to 2023 and in over fifty films. He often played rough, tough guys, a quality that (some say) reflected his own personality, as his temper tended to be on a short leash and he could (in some circumstances) be quite violent. However, on the way through his acting career he won three Césars.

Niels Philippe Arestrup was born in Montreuil, east of Paris, to a Danish father who worked in a scales factory, and to a French mother, a typist and factory worker. In his twenties he studied acting under the influential Russian actress and director Tania Balachova, and started appearing on stage, making his debut in 1970 in Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream, based on Hinduism and Greek philosophy, before moving on to Molière, Dostoyevsky, Lanford Wilson, Jean Genet, Chekhov, Strindberg, Marguerite Duras and Edward Albee, to name but a few.

He appeared in his first film the same year, in Alain Resnais’ Stavisky with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the title part of a fraudulent businessman, also with François Périer, Claude Rich and Charles Boyer. The film’s score was by Stephen Sondheim. Jeanne Moreau directed him in Lumière, about four actresses and their relationships. In Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle he played the driver of Akerman’s offbeat heroine. Arestrup carried on making films in France during the 1970s and ‘80s including The Future is Woman (1984). Directed by Marco Ferreri, it showed a sexual threesome between a woman who rescues a young girl, takes her home where she meets the woman’s partner... When Arestrup started working with director Jacques Audiard in 2005 he became better known internationally. The Beat That My Heart Skipped saw him as a horrible landlord who, facing bankruptcy, relies on his son to help him out, although the son (Romain Duris) cannot decide whether to help his father or become a classical pianist. The film was a great success, winning awards at Bafta, Berlin and eight Césars. Audiard also cast him in The Prophet (2009), a prison drama in which he played the leader of Corsican mobsters who has to protect a teenager from rival gangs. He gave a strong and forceful performance alongside Tahar Rahim who was excellent as the novice prisoner. The film won nine Césars including one for Arestrup for best supporting actor.

Before making The Prophet, Arestrup was in Julian Schnabel’s extraordinary film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly about a man (Jean-Dominique Bauby, played by Mathieu Amalric) who was trapped in his own body by a stroke, his only movement being the blinking of his left eye. Amazingly he managed to communicate and ‘write’ his autobiography. Arestrup’s role was not a major one but to be in the film was an achievement in itself.

Niels Arestrup certainly made his mark on French cinema in films such as Bertrand Tavernier’s The French Minister, Volker Schlöndorff’s Return to Montaux, and Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate about Van Gogh, as well as Angelina Jolie’s romantic drama By the Sea, with then hubby Brad Pitt. He also played the Grandfather in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse. He wrote, directed and appeared in a political drama The Candidate in 2007, while back in 1981 he had written and starred in Du blues dans la tête. On a personal note, he married the actress and writer Isabelle Le Nouvel in 2012, after they had been together for ten years. They have twins, a son and daughter.

MICHAEL DARVELL