Facts about Noomi Rapace
Noomi Rapace Biography
Noomi Rapace is the titular star of the films based on Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009).
Noomi Rapace was raised in Iceland and Sweden, and began her acting career when she was just 7 years old. Going out on her own at age of 15, she worked during the late 1990s in theater and television, including the series Tre kronor in 1996 and 1997. Her breakout film role came with the 2007 film Daisy Diamond; her performance earned rave reviews and a host of European film awards and made her a star in Scandinavia.
Rapace became an international movie star as Lisbeth Salander, the tough and tortured, computer-hacking protagonist of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, all of which were released in 2009. Rapace made her Hollywood film debut in the Robert Downey, Jr. adventure flick Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011, with Jude Law), and in 2012 starred in Ridley Scott‘s big-budget space flick Prometheus.
Her other films include the Norwegian thriller Babycall (2010), the spy action film Unlocked (2017, with Orlando Bloom), the crime drama Stockholm (2018, with Ethan Hawke), and the freaky Icelandic thriller Lamb (2021).
Extra credit
Noomi Rapace pronounces her name “KNOW-me ra-PAHS”… She married the actor Ola Rapace in 2001, and they had a son, Lev, in 2003. The couple were divorced in 2011… According to a 2012 feature in the New York Times, “Noomi Noren was 21 when she started dating Ola Norell, and three months later they married, inventing the surname ‘Rapace,’ pronounced ra-PAHS, which means ‘bird of prey’ in French”… The American versions of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo films star Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander.