Niels Arestrup
Birthday: Born in 1949-02-08 in Montreuil, Seine [now Seine-Saint-Denis], France
Deathday: 2024-12-01
Niels Arestrup was a French actor, film director and screenwriter. His father was Danish and his mother was French. He has won two César Awards for Best Supporting Actor for De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté and Un prophète, both films where he was directed by Jacques Audiard.
TV Credits
Baron Noir
Character: Francis Laugier
In a tale of epic scale, French politician Philippe Rickwaert thirsts for revenge against his political enemies. Philippe’s political career is in shambles after he is sacrificed by the presidential candidate from the Left, Francis Laugier, in order to save his election. Step by step, Philippe plots against him and forges an alliance with his closest advisor, Amélie Dorendeu....
Suite noire
Character: Gérard
Step into a world of seedy seduction, sinister plots, bloody murder, and hard vengeance: the pulp-fueled realm of "Suite Noire."...
Le Tourbillon des jours
Character: Germain
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Les Papillons noirs
Character: Albert Desiderio
Low on inspiration for his second book, a gloomy novelist agrees to write a memoir for a dying man — and swiftly becomes part of his bloodstained past....
Le Grand Échiquier
Character: Self
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Champs-Elysées
Character: Self
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Capitaine Marleau
Character: Hervé Gerfaut
Beneath her eccentric appearance, Captain Marleau is a formidable detective. Her Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap, her character, her unusual appearance, her humor, her unpredictable behavior--Captain Marleau is not your average gendarme. She never rushes an investigation; she becomes the investigation and relentlessly pursues the suspects....
Movie Credits
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Character: Robert Seyr
A ruthless real estate agent discovers a passion for piano and auditions with help from a young virtuoso, but the pressures of his corrupt career threaten to derail his musical aspirations....
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Character: Roussin
The true story of Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind....
A Prophet
Character: César Luciani
Sentenced to six years in prison, Malik El Djebena is alone in the world and can neither read nor write. On his arrival at the prison, he seems younger and more brittle than the others detained there. At once he falls under the sway of a group of Corsicans who enforce their rule in the prison. As the 'missions' go by, he toughens himself and wins the confidence of the Corsican group....
The Big Night
Character: Léon
In Lausanne, Léon is involved by accident with a small Leninist group and gets to know Léa, a dedicated activist and the group leader's mistress. The police keep a close watch on them and trouble is bound to follow....
Farewell
Character: Vallier
An intricate thriller about an ordinary man thrust into the biggest theft of Soviet information of the Cold War. Right after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A French businessman based in Moscow, Pierre Froment, makes an unlikely connection with Grigoriev, a senior KGB officer disenchanted with what the Communist ideal has become under Brezhnev. Grigoriev begins passing Froment highly sensitive information about the Soviet spy network in the US....
The Candidate
Character: Georges
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A Private Affair
Character: Le père de Rachel
Divorced private detective Francois Maneri is assigned by his agency to investigate the disappearance of Rachel, a young student who has been missing for six months. After interviewing Rachel's family, friends and classmates, Francois is attacked and injured by an anonymous assailant and becomes reluctant to continue his search. But when Rachel's body is found, Francois is drawn deeper into the investigation as he discovers the dead girl's secret life....
You Will Be My Son
Character: Paul de Marseul
Paul de Marseul, a prestigious wine-maker and owner of a renowned chateau and vineyard in Saint-Emilion, is disheartened by the notion of his son Martin taking over the family business. Martin does not seem to have inherited the qualities that Paul esteems in a wine-maker: persistence, creative insight and technical prowess matched with passion for the job and the product, and Paul frequently reminds him of this, whether explicitly or in subtle gestures. When Philippe, the son of his manager, ap...
The Future Is Woman
Character: Gordon
In this improbable, ponderous story about a couple who do not want to have children of their own, and a pregnant, single woman who needs a home for awhile, the relationship between the three is strange, at the very least....
The Big Picture
Character: Bartholomé
Paul Exben is a success story – partner in one of Paris's most exclusive law firms, big salary, big house, glamorous wife and two sons straight out of a Gap catalog. But when he finds out that Sarah, his wife, is cheating on him with Greg Kremer, a local photographer, a rush of blood provokes Paul into a fatal error....
La Rumba
Character: Detaix
Paris, 1938. In a lavishly decorated nightclub, couples dance the syncopated rhythms of Latin America: Rumba, Cucaracha, Tango, and also the Charleston, Foxtrot and Boston. Among beautiful women, local pimps and Mussolini's spies brush each other on the dance floor, and in the streets. A police inspector is charged with a difficult task, to clean-up the city streets - just when bodies start falling around, as the Mafia and the spies tend each other deadly traps....
Sarah's Key
Character: Jules Dufaure
On the night of 16 July 1942, ten year old Sarah and her parents are being arrested and transported to the Velodrome d'Hiver in Paris where thousands of other jews are being sent to get deported. Sarah however managed to lock her little brother in a closet just before the police entered their apartment. Sixty years later, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist in Paris, gets the assignment to write an article about this raid, a black page in the history of France. She starts digging archives and ...
Memoirs of a French Whore
Character: André
Marie is nineteen and bored in her little suburban life with no future. In a café, she meets the charismatic and beautiful Gerard. Blinded by adoration, Mary decides to leave her parents and her clerk job to live with the man she considers as the love of her life. But Gerard is a pimp, who soon forces her into prostitution. From within homes to out on the streets, the young woman gradually discovers a world of decay and violence....
Je Tu Il Elle
Character: Truck-driver
A woman suffers a subdued psychological breakdown in the wake of a devastating breakup....
Small World
Character: Thomas Senn
Conrad Lang, a handyman in a rich family - he has been raised like a brother with Thomas, who has the same age -, accidentally puts fire to the big holiday house he keeps. He returns to the town he grew up in, to the family home, where Philippe, Thomas's son, and Simone are getting married. Conrad's frequent memory loss and behavioural problems rapidly reveal a neurological disease (Alzheimer's is suggested by doctor Cohen when he examens Elvira) which leads Elvira, Thomas's stepmother, to insta...
Lulu Kreutz's Picnic
Character: Jascha Steg
Joseph and Olga Stegudith, who are elderly Parisians of Viennese Jewish extraction, come to luxurious Evian with Olga's brother Michel Mazelsky to hear their son, virtuoso cellist Jascha, perform. Jascha is lovesick over violinist Anna Ghirardi, with whom he had a brief affair a year ago, although she's happily married to naturalist Primo....
Parlez-moi d'amour
Character: Richard
Justine and Richard's 15-year relationship ends in separation due to irreconcilable differences with Justine maintaining custody of their three boys. Her new life means having to deal with being a single parent but at the same time, she comes to terms with her own parents' divorce and finds a common bond with her long-suffering mother. Richard, a renowned author, deals with the situation by devoting all his attention to his writing. Both are forced to confront their uncertain futures, while exam...
Lorfou
Character: Angelo
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Our Children
Character: André Pinget
Young and full of life, Murielle has a promising future ahead of her when she meets and falls head over heels for Mounir. A wedding soon follows, and the happy couple quickly set about preparing to make a family. However, with family come ties, and none come as tight as that between Mounir and his adoptive father. As Murielle continues to bring new life into the family, frictions between Mounir and Doctor Pinget reach boiling point. Helpless to extract her husband and children from the wealthy n...
Diesel
Character: Nelson
A prostitute, released from prison, tries to change her life, but a murderous slave organization, the Consortium, is determined to bring her back to the fold or kill her, which forces her to seek help from Liberty, an anti-Consortium group....
One Man's War
Character: Narrator
Via the New York Times: "...a dialogue between found objects... the remarkably calm, somewhat banal wartime journals of Ernst Junger, a German writer and army officer living in occupied Paris in World War II, and newsreel footage of Paris as it really was."...
Divertimento
Character: Sergiu Celibidache
Zahia Ziouani, 17, dreams of becoming a conductor, while her twin sister Fettouma hopes to be a professional cellist. They want to make classical music accessible to everyone and create their own orchestra....
Meeting Venus
Character: Zoltan Szanto
Celebrated Swedish opera star Karin Anderson is slated to appear in an internationally-telecast production of Tannhauser. Ms. Anderson balks at the notion of working with obscure Hungarian conductor Zoltan Szanto. The much-anticipated production may never get off the ground, thanks to labor-management difficulties, intramural jealousies, and clashing egos. Amidst all this chaos, the mismatched Anderson and Szanto fall in love....
Doux amer
Character: Jean
A married woman, Anne Lambert has a child with her lover. But her lover becomes afraid and refuses to recognize the baby. Very invested in her career, Anne, an architect, decides to raise her child alone....
Lumière
Character: Nano
Sarah, an actress nearing her forties, has invited 3 friends to join her for a holiday in Provence. This is the prologue for what happened a year ago in Paris with a man Sarah had long considered a platonic friend. She had just finished a film, had also finished her relationship with the director and was about to receive an award…...
Tomorrow's Children
Character: Philippe
The hero of this bleak science-fiction story is a married man who, along with his wife, survives the mysterious destruction of the world. After his wife dies, he makes plans to seek out whatever remnants of civilization exist. However, the arrival of a group of children and their older mentor changes his plans....
The French Minister
Character: Claude Maupas
Alexandre Taillard de Vorms is a force to be reckoned with. With his silver mane and tanned, athletic body, he stalks the world stage as Minister of Foreign Affairs for France, waging his own war backed up by the holy trinity of diplomatic concepts: legitimacy, lucidity, and efficacy. Enter Arthur Vlaminck. Hired to write the minister's speeches, Arthur must contend with the sensibilities of his boss and the dirty dealings within the Quai d'Orsay, the ministry's home....
Rewind
Character: Fabrice Rivail
Terrorist Paul Mansart, imprisoned in a maximum security prison, overcomes initial reluctance and agrees to experiment in “virtual reality” in order to restore the identity of the mysterious criminal who prepared the assassination attempt that cost Paul his arrest and, possibly, a number of recent terrorist attacks in Europe....
Sincerely Charlotte
Character: Mathieu
In a most unusual, near menage a trois, Charlotte is a terrified young singer who is forced to hide out at the home of her ex-boyfriend -- her current male companion has been murdered in his apartment, and she fears the worst. The trouble is that Mathieu, her ex, is happily living with his new love Christine....
Diplomacy
Character: General Dietrich von Choltitz
On the night of August 24, 1944, the fate of Paris rests with General von Choltitz, who plans to destroy the city on Hitler's orders. As the general prepares to detonate explosives throughout the capital, Swedish consul Raoul Nordling uses diplomacy in a desperate bid to convince him to defy the orders and save Paris....
96 heures
Character: Victor Kancel
Carré is the boss of the BRB (Brigade for the Repression of Banditry). 3 years earlier, he arrested a big mobster, Kancel. Today, thanks to an extraction, Kancel kidnaps the cop. He has 96 hours to elicit a single information: know who gave him....
Plus ça va, moins ça va
Character: Vincent
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La Cerisaie
Character: Lopakhine
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Among Wolves
Character: Mike
An American general with highly confidential defence information has been kidnapped by terrorists and is being held in a cliff-top fortress in the Mediterranean....
The Dune
Character: Ruben
Through the course of several accidents and chance encounters, Hanoch and Ruben will meet and each of them will have to face a page of his personal history, a page that they both need to turn for good....
Fragments of Antonin
Character: le professeur Lantier
A psychiatrist who probes the mind of traumatized soldiers attempts to unlock the secret that drove a gentle but deeply-disturbed World War I veteran to the edge of insanity....
A Second Chance
Character: Henri Lanot
Imprisoned as an accessory to murder, Catherine gives birth to a son she conceived in prison. Eighteen years later, her sentence served, she is reunited with the boy, Simon, who has remained in an orphanage the entire time. She is accompanied by toothsome prison buddy Sarah, and gradually these people whose lives have been frozen in time "thaw" and get on with the business of living....
By the Sea
Character: Michel
Set in France during the mid-1970s, Vanessa, a former dancer, and her husband Roland, an American writer, travel the country together. They seem to be growing apart, but when they linger in one quiet, seaside town they begin to draw close to some of its more vibrant inhabitants, such as a local bar/café-keeper and a hotel owner....
Délit mineur
Character: Claude
A teenager named Guillaume admits to being guilty of his father's murder in order to protect his dear mother....
So Long Africa
Character: Jacques
Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, April 2011. Jacques and Safi arrive from Abidjan, from where they've been repatriated in an emergency. He's as tough as nails, after too much time in the African sun and enjoying an expatriate lifestyle while running a hotel. Safi, his fourteen-year-old daughter, is used to living with her mother and doesn't know what to think about her loud-mouthed and useless father who has suddenly taken her away with him. Moved to a hostel in Nice, they learn to get to kno...
La Femme flic
Character: Dominique Allier, le photographe de la MJC
Young police inspector Corinne Levasseur interrogated a dealer without the judge's consent. Following an indiscretion of her lover, the substitute Berthot, Corinne is transferred to a small town in the North who lives under the thumb of a rich industrialist and his family. He is given subaltern tasks. Intrigued by the strange death of a teenager, she stubbornly leads an investigation that allows her to trace the chain of a child prostitution network in which are mixed a notable and his son-in-la...
Alone
Character: Jean
Jean, the lead character in this psychological journey is torn by a search for his lost childhood, the overwhelming need to love a woman of his dreams (someone he has invented), and a struggle with his latent bisexuality. Jean finds some photos inside an automatic photo station that look like his mother who died soon after he was born. He starts to fantasize about the woman, giving her a name and identity and waiting for her to appear. During this time, he meets Carole and has an affair with her...
Ville étrangère
Character: Gregor Keuschnig
An Austrian diplomat assigned to Paris wakes up after having a strange nightmare and finds himself emotionally distanced from his world. He feels absolutely nothing as he attends to his daily routine. He gradually begins to behave in an increasingly strange manner. The story is based on Moment of True Feeling, a novel by Peter Handke....
Return to Montauk
Character: Walter
During a book tour in the United States, Max meets and falls in love with a young woman. Many years later, Max returns to the United States, hoping to reunite with his young lover....
Albert Savarus
Character: Albert Savarus
Adaptation of the Balzac story as told by Rosalie, a young girl in love with the idea of her extraordinary neighbor, Albert Savarus, and the lengths she goes to ensure their marriage, even after she learns he is deeply in love with another woman....
See You Up There
Character: Marcel Péricourt
In November 1918, a few days before the Armistice, when Lieutenant Pradelle orders a senseless attack, he causes a useless disaster; but his outrageous act also binds the lives of two soldiers who have nothing more in common than the battlefield: Édouard saves Albert, although at a high cost. They become companions in misfortune who will attempt to survive in a changing world. Pradelle, in his own way, does the same....
Miss O'Gynie and the Flower Men
Character: Yves
Pierre and Yves, two homosexuals, live a cozy love in a small Breton village until the arrival of Anne, the ex-girlfriend of Pierre, who will try to separate them....
At Eternity's Gate
Character: Madman
Famed but tormented artist Vincent van Gogh spends his final years in Arles, France, painting masterworks of the natural world that surrounds him....
The Song of Roland
Character: Le commerçant / Oton
Roland des Roncesvalles is a legendary knight from the age of chivalry in France. In the 11th-century epic La Chanson de Roland, he is depicted as a key figure in halting the advance of the Arabs into France. In this story, the 10th-century legend is staged by a group of 12th-century pilgrims using the 11th-century poem. Their acting is interrupted by a violent peasant uprising, which kills many of the pilgrims. However, one of the survivors, is converted to the peasant cause and later speaks ou...
War Horse
Character: Grandfather
On the brink of the First World War, Albert's beloved horse Joey is sold to the Cavalry by his father. Against the backdrop of the Great War, Joey begins an odyssey full of danger, joy, and sorrow, and he transforms everyone he meets along the way. Meanwhile, Albert, unable to forget his equine friend, searches the battlefields of France to find Joey and bring him home....
Stavisky...
Character: Rudolph, le secrétaire de Trotski
Biarritz, 1933. Charm and talent help small-time swindler Serge Alexandre, alias Stavisky, to bribe his way into the centre of French political power. But when his great scam involving millions gets exposed, he brings the government to the verge of collapse and the country to the brink of civil war....
La Femme abandonnée
Character: Oskar de Wilno
Tired of Parisian life, Louis de Nueil settles in a provincial village to rest from his hectic life. But he quickly gets bored. He then meets Fanny de Lussange, as beautiful as she is mysterious. The young man decides to court Fanny....
Les Derniers Jours de la victime
Character: Mendizábal
Mendizábal, a reputed hitman, is commissioned to eliminate Rodolfo Kulpe, a small-time criminal....
Villa Caprice
Character: Luc Germon
Famous lawyer, Luc Germon adds Gilles Fontaine, one of the most powerful bosses in France, to his clients. He is suspected of having acquired a magnificent property, Villa Caprice, under questionable conditions....
Jacques Audiard, le cinéma à cœur
Character: Self - Interviewee
In eight films, Jacques Audiard has renewed French cinema, without alienating either the critics or the success. It is only at the age of 42 that he starts directing, after having been an editor and a scriptwriter. In 1994, he directed his first film, "Regarde les hommes tomber", whose conflicting shooting was an ordeal for this misanthropic beginner. It was with "Sur mes lèvres", in 2001, that he forged his cinematographic language: contained lyricism, deliberate imperfection of images, ellipse...
Charlie Dingo
Character: William
Charlie (Guy Marchand) returns home after being declared legally dead to reclaim his wife Georgia (Caroline Cellier) and cash in on a lucrative life insurance policy in this shadowy drama. He finds Georgia is married to the crooked cop William (Niels Arestrup), who has his eye on the insurance money. Antihero Charlie and the villainous police inspector head towards an inevitable confrontation, while Georgia is caught in the middle....
Le Retour d'Elisabeth Wolff
Character: Stan Pilgrim
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Fernando Krapp m'a écrit cette lettre
Character: Fernando Krapp
A French adaptation of Tankred Dorst's play "Fernando Krapp hat mir diesen Brief geschrieben", staged by Bernard Murat....