Niels Arestrup, who has died aged 75, had been a stalwart of French theatre and cinema since the 1970s, but his profile was raised internationally in the first decade of this century by two films directed by Jacques Audiard.
In The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), a reimagining of James Toback’s 1978 thriller Fingers, Arestrup was the brutish slumlord now fallen on hard times, and increasingly reliant on a son (Romain Duris) who is torn between a thuggish, disreputable life and his dreams of being a classical pianist.
For Audiard’s ambitious thriller A Prophet (2009), he was cast as another corrosive patriarch, this time a Corsican ruling the roost behind bars and pulling the strings of a vulnerable new prisoner, played by Tahar Rahim. Eventually, the puppet turns the tables on the puppet-master. Arestrup captures acutely the former kingpin’s ignominious decline. “What we see etched on [his] face is pathetic loneliness and the horror of dying alone in prison,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in this paper.
Among the nine César awards that went to A Prophet was one for Arestrup for best supporting actor, a prize he had already scooped for The Beat That My Heart Skipped. A third César came his way for Bertrand Tavernier’s political comedy The French Minister (2013).
His portrayals of unsavoury bullies were not limited to his films with Audiard. In the harrowing Our Children (2013), he was again paired with Rahim; this time, they were father and adopted son, with the older man, a physician, exerting an invidious influence on the younger one’s marriage. He was another malign paternal figure in You Will Be My Son (2011), in which he played the overbearing owner of a prestigious Bordeaux vineyard.
His resentful sneer and off-white, nicotine-tinted locks called to mind a down-at-heel department-store Santa. In 2013, the critic Kenneth Turan named him “the most quietly terrifying presence in film today”. The Observer’s Philip French called him “confidently menacing”.
That feeling was not confined to his acting. There had long been allegations of violence toward female co-stars: he was accused of slapping Isabelle Adjani and trying to strangle Myriam Boyer, though he never faced any criminal charges.
He was born in Montreuil, to a Breton mother, who worked as a typist as well as on an assembly line making radios, and a Danish father, who was a manager at a Testut scales factory.
Arestrup was 20 when he found work in Paris, first in a pizzeria, then selling carpets. There was a job waiting for him in his father’s factory, but he happened to take an acting class with Tania Balachova at the Théâtre de la Gâité Montparnasse. She said: “I have nothing special to tell you. You are an actor … you have nothing to do with it, that’s how it is.”
Immediately he was on a new path. “I told my parents that I felt good there, that it was a world that attracted me, [and] it was a worry for them,” he said in 2021. “I took the risk, as they say in poker. I went all-in.”
He later studied with the actor Andreas Voutsinas, who coached Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda and Faye Dunaway. Voutsinas approached Arestrup after seeing him in a production of Crime and Punishment. “He suggested that I work with him. He saw my flaws very clearly.” The issue, he explained, was that Arestrup “wanted to seduce, to be strong, to be masculine … I broke bottles, I hit, I drank a lot. This behaviour was reflected in my work. I was excessive. Voutsinas told me: ‘You don’t have to do this. By simply being yourself … you will become much more interesting.’”
He became established in theatre in the early 1970s. His earliest film appearances came in Alain Resnais’ political drama Stavisky, where he was Trotsky’s secretary Rudolph Klement, and Miss O’Gynie et les Hommes Fleurs (both 1974), in which he played one half of a gay couple whose relationship is threatened by the arrival in their village of a young woman.
In the same year, Arestrup was a rough-and-ready Brando-like presence, complete with Stanley Kowalski-style white T-shirt, in Chantal Akerman’s groundbreaking debut Je Tu Il Elle. He played a truck driver who picks up a hitchhiker, played by Akerman, and delivers lewd monologues to her en route. He was cast after Akerman approached him one evening to offer the role. “When do we shoot?” he asked. “Right now,” she replied. The crew was waiting nearby.
He was capable of bringing fresh shading to time-worn characters, as he did in Peter Brook’s 1981 stage revival of The Cherry Orchard. The New York Times noted that his Lopakhin was “not the boorish rustic we often find … but a man of considerable sensitivity … Lopakhin has suppressed the lyrical side of himself, but the instinct is there. In Mr Arestrup’s portrayal, we saw a man lacking in table manners but not in taste of sympathy. Instead of wondering, as we sometimes do, why Varya wants to marry such an oaf, we wondered why he wanted to marry her …”
In 1991, Arestrup starred in István Szabó’s Meeting Venus, as a Hungarian conductor at the centre of a chaotic production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, alongside Glenn Close as the initially icy opera singer who thaws out in his presence.
Following the success of A Prophet, Steven Spielberg cast him as the grandfather to a young girl in his adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s first world war novel War Horse (2011). In Volker Schlöndorff’s film of Cyril Gély’s play Diplomacy (2014), Arestrup reprised his stage performance as General Dietrich von Choltitz, who disobeys Hitler’s orders to destroy Paris in the prelude to the allies’ arrival in 1944.
In 2021, he starred on stage in 88 Fois l’Infini (88 Times Infinity), a play written by his wife, Isabelle Le Nouvel, whom he married in 2012, and based on an event from his own past: his discovery at the age of 18 that he was not, as he had been led to believe, an only child, but had a half-brother living in Denmark.
About his increasing success, he was resolutely unfazed. “I never wanted fame,” he said. “The only topic of conversation that doesn’t interest me personally is me.”
He is survived by Le Nouvel and their twins, a son and a daughter.
• Niels Arestrup, actor, born 8 February 1949; died 1 December 2024
