Noomi Rapace

Noomi Rapace (born December 28, 1979, Hudiksvall, Sweden) is a Swedish actress who was best known for portraying Lisbeth Salander in film adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy of crime novels.

Norén was the daughter of a Swedish actress and a Spanish flamenco singer. As a young child she lived with her mother and stepfather in Iceland, where her first acting experience was a small nonspeaking part in the film Í skugga hrafnsins (1988; Shadow of the Raven). When she was 15, she returned on her own to Sweden and studied theatre. She worked regularly on the stage, in art-house films, and on television, notably in several episodes (1996–97) of the long-running TV serial Tre kronor (“Three Crowns”). In 2001 she married (divorced 2011) the actor Ola Rapace, who later costarred with her in Svinalängorna (2010; Beyond), in which she portrayed a woman who must come to terms with her past as the abused daughter of alcoholic parents. Notable among Rapace’s other movies was the bleak Danish picture Daisy Diamond (2007), in which she starred as an aspiring actress and single mother whose life spirals ever downward.

Rapace’s breakthrough, however, came with her masterful portrayal of the damaged but resilient hacker-turned-sleuth Lisbeth Salander in the popular adaptations of Larsson’s best sellers. She transformed herself for the role—getting piercings (though not Salander’s famous tattoos), training for several months in kickboxing and other martial arts, and learning to ride a motorcycle. The three movies—Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire), and Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest)—were filmed back-to-back, and all were first released in 2009. Rapace’s success in embodying and expressing the inner life of a complex character who maintains a deliberately opaque facade earned international praise from critics and fans alike.

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In 2011 Rapace appeared in her first English-language film, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. She subsequently had roles in the science-fiction thriller Prometheus (2012) and in the crime dramas Dead Man Down (2013) and The Drop (2014). In 2015 she appeared as the wife of a Soviet MGB agent in Child 44, and two years later she starred as a CIA operative in Unlocked. Her numerous credits from 2017 included the Netflix film Bright, an action drama set in a Los Angeles populated by humans and mystical creatures. Rapace was next cast as a bank employee held captive in Stockholm (2018), a fictional version of the 1973 hostage crisis that gave Stockholm syndrome its name, and then as a counter-terrorism expert protecting an heiress in Close (2019), an action thriller inspired by the life of a celebrity bodyguard. Also in 2019 Rapace played a grieving mother who stalks a family in Angel of Mine, and she joined the TV series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, portraying a German intelligence agent. In the film The Secrets We Keep (2020), she was cast as a woman seeking revenge against a man she believes assaulted her and killed others during World War II.

Rapace’s credits from 2021 included I onde dager (The Trip), an action thriller about a couple who go on a getaway to ostensibly improve their relationship, but each of them actually plans to kill the other. That year she also starred in the horror-drama Lamb, which centres on a childless couple in Iceland who find a newborn baby. She later appeared in the postapocalyptic Svart krabba (Black Crab) and in You Won’t Be Alone (both 2022); the latter, an exploration of identity and belonging, follows a young woman raised in isolation who becomes a shape-shifting witch.