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.
