In memoriam: Niels Arestrup (Telegraph 13/12/24)

Niels Arestrup, who has died aged 75, was an imposing French character actor acclaimed for playing menacing father figures in Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) and A Prophet (2009). Those roles yielded two of his three César awards for Best Supporting Actor, while also prompting renewed discussion of his earlier treatment of actresses, which fell somewhere between heavy-handed and outright violent.

Arestrup’s career began in the early 1970s, with roles in prominent examples of auteur cinema. Briefly glimpsed as Trotsky’s secretary in Alain Resnais’ Stavisky (1974), the young actor nailed a memorably lengthy monologue as a lusty trucker in Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle (1974), embodying much the same unreconstructed blue-collar masculinity as his contemporary Gérard Depardieu.

Both actors were frequently cast as rogues, but Arestrup only broke through internationally in his fifties, newly stocky and stern of visage, and with a vivid white shock of hair. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Audiard’s nifty reworking of James Toback’s Fingers (1978), Arestrup terrified as the slum landlord bearing down on pianist son Romain Duris; in A Prophet, he was César Luciani, the Corsican godfather running the world from a prison cell.

The films’ success ensured further plum roles: as the former hostage Roussin in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), a farmer in occupied France in Sarah’s Key (2010), as a sour-faced vintner organising his succession in You Will Be My Son (2011). Notable American directors lined up to employ Arestrup: he played the grandfather in Spielberg’s War Horse (2011) and the bar owner Brad Pitt befriends in Angelina Jolie’s By the Sea (2015).

In France, however, he found himself newly dogged by longstanding allegations of abusive behaviour towards female co-stars. Arestrup was accused of fracturing Maria Schneider’s coccyx and perforating Miou-Miou’s eardrum with a slap on the same day during the filming of La dérobade/Memoirs of a French Whore (1979). “You have to simulate,” Arestrup was heard saying to director Daniel Duval, “but Miou-Miou wanted it to look real.”

In 1983, Isabelle Adjani left a stage production of Miss Julie after being slapped by Arestrup during rehearsals; thirteen years later, Arestrup’s company was forced to pay more than 800,000 francs in damages to Myriam Boyer, after she was fired from a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? during which, she alleged, her co-star almost strangled her on stage.

In later life, Arestrup spoke frankly about his history of alcoholism – “I broke bottles, I lashed out, I drank a lot” – but he sounded weary when pressed on these allegations in 2007: “It’s been going on for twenty-five years, since Miss Julie... And since then, I’ve tried everything: explaining myself, keeping quiet, but nothing works, it sticks to me.”

Niels Philippe Arestrup was born on February 8, 1949 in Montreuil (now Seine-Saint-Denis) to Knud Arestrup, a Dane who fled his homeland upon the German invasion, and his French wife Yvonne (née Turmel). He was a solitary child and an unwilling student; as he once confessed, “uneducated, I could neither be tamed nor restrain myself”.

After failing his baccalaureate in 1968, Arestrup laboured through various odd jobs while studying theatre under the actress Tania Balachova. He made his stage debut as a horse guard in a 1970 production of Le Misanthrope, appeared in Peter Brook’s 1981 revival of The Cherry Orchard, and returned to Le Misanthrope, this time in the lead, in 1989. That same year, he began a four-year spell as the director of Paris’s Renaissance theatre.

Following success with Audiard, Arestrup wrote and directed the political thriller Le candidat (2007); he enjoyed further success in this realm, winning a third César for Bertrand Tavernier’s droll procedural Quai d’Orsay/The French Minister (2013) and earning plaudits as a kingmaker in TV’s Baron noir (2016-20). He won a Molière as Rothko in John Logan’s play Red in 2020; his final role, in the miniseries Les papillons noirs (2022), was that of an old man with a troubling past.

Arestrup is survived by his wife, the actress Isabelle Le Nouvel, whom he married in 2012, and their two twins, of whom he spoke in 2021, with reference to his roles as distant fathers: “I didn’t want children. I was always off somewhere else, touring, filming. At first, these creatures, organically connected to their mother, stunned me, paralysed me. And then love followed all by itself.”

Niels Arestrup, born February 8, 1949, died December 1, 2024.