‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ star says she spent her childhood in Sweden and Iceland “out playing and building stuff and riding horses,” sharing that “there were no boundaries, really.”
It’s even more impressive to consider that actress Noomi Rapace is fluent in multiple languages — including Swedish, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, and England — when you consider that she taught herself.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo star opened up about her childhood on a remote farm in Iceland, which involved a lot of “playing and building stuff and riding horses,” but not a lot in formal education. In fact, Rapace compared herself to The Jungle Book’s Mowgli.
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“There were no boundaries, really. I’m self-taught and self-raised, and I couldn’t properly read and write until I was 12, 13,” she told The Times, adding that there were no books or television. “Sometimes I felt like Mowgli, this child who was raised in the wilderness.”
Rapace had previously opened up to The Guardian about her unorthodox upbringing, including the four CDs she owned and cherished: Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Dolly Parton, and “a weird Icelandic band called KK.”
“I came from a poor farm, I’m not educated, no one opened doors for me, I don’t come from money,” Rapace told the outlet. “I grew up on this farm, and we didn’t have a TV for many years. There was no radio, there was no newspaper, there was no information coming in.”
Born to a Spanish flamenco singer and a Swedish actress, Rapace moved with her mother and stepfather from her native Sweden to Iceland when she was five. Just two years later, she landed her first role, a non-speaking one in the Icelandic film In the Shadow of the Raven.
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The Swedish actress broke big when she took on the role of Lisbeth Salandar in 2009 for the Swedish-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, with all three films released in 2009. The first two films in the original trilogy have also been adapted in the US, with Rooney Mara and Claire Foy taking on the role of Lisbeth, respectively.
By the time Rapace took the role that would define much of her career, she had already adopted her stage last name, which she and ex-husband Ola Norell settled on because it means “bird of prey” in French and Italian and they thought it sounded “cool.” The couple welcomed son Lev in 2003 before their 2011 divorce.
“My son said once, when we just moved to London, he was eating breakfast … ‘Mummy, do you know I’m the first-born Rapace in the world?'” Rapace recalled to The Guardian. “So yeah, I think I picked pretty well.”
Rapace is currently promoting her leading role in the Apple TV+ trippy science fiction series Constellation. Also starring Jonathan Banks and James D’Arcy, the first six episodes are now streaming with new installments dropping every Wednesday.
