An essential figure in cinema. Before becoming famous, Pierre Niney grew up in Paris with a father who was a documentary film teacher at Normale Sup, FEMIS and for Sciences Po and a mother who was an author for creative leisure manuals. Surrounded by his two older sisters, he was immersed in an artistic and literary environment.

However, nothing predestined Pierre Niney to make a career on the big screen. Before finding himself at the top of the bill, he rather nurtured another vocation when he was a child. “When I was little, I dreamed of being an airline pilot – no hunting!”, he revealed to our colleagues from Paris Match in 2021.

A childhood dream that he never had the opportunity to realize, in particular because of certain shortcomings. “I had to give up because I was bad at math, myopic and color blind”, according to comments quoted by Télé Loisirs. Despite this failure, Pierre Niney turned to comedy, following a theater workshop in college. From the height of his 11 years, his teacher offers him to play pieces by Valère Novarina. “It was more of an instinctive approach than a technical one,” the actor told Le Figaro in 2011. “I just wanted to tell stories and put energy into them.”

Since his first steps in college, Pierre Niney pursued his vocation during his time at the Lycée Claude Monet in Paris. An establishment where he joined the theater class led by Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman and François Regnault. “That’s where I spotted him,” told his agent Brigitte Descormiers to our colleagues. In parallel with his literary baccalaureate, theater option, the young prodigy successfully entered the Cours Florent. The beginning of a great promising career…

At the end of the 2000s, Pierre Niney made his first appearances in the cinema. He landed supporting roles in the “teen movies” Our 18 Years and LOL, before appearing in the historical film The Army of Crime. It is however at the theater that the actor will shine by becoming the youngest resident of the Comédie Française in 2010.

At the same time, Pierre Niney obtains his first main role in the cinema in the film I like watching girls. A performance that will earn him a nomination as best hope at the Césars in 2012. After having shone in Comme des frères, where he was awarded the Patrick Dewaere prize, the actor will be crowned best actor at the Césars for his interpretation in the biopic on Yves Saint Laurent in 2015.

Moving between comedy and drama, Pierre Niney also made a name for himself for having played in Save or Perish in 2018, where he plays Franck Pasquier, a Paris firefighter who sacrificed his life during an intervention in the field. A strong role, inspired by real events, for which he underwent an incredible physical transformation. “I worked every day with a nutritionist and a coach. In all, I gained 10 kg of muscle. The difficulty was having to lose it for the second part of the film in which Franck is in the hospital and is therefore physically diminished. For 3 weeks I only drank juice!”, he told Paris Match, adding. “I also had 4 hours of daily makeup to mimic the aftermath of burnt skin. It was intense.” An everyday hero admired by those close to him.

Asked by Gala 2015, Pierre Niney already mentioned the part of women who played a big role in his life: those of his family. “I was lucky to be surrounded by women who helped me grow, learned to express what I felt, what I thought, to reflect very early on about myself, my desires. Maturity is also to know what you want. On this, I benefited a lot from the presence of my cousins, my sisters…”.

But another woman also has a big place in the heart of Pierre Niney: his companion Natasha Andrews, an Australian actress and photographer whose love life he talks little about. As a couple since 2008, it was on the benches of Cours Florent that they met. From their union, the two actors had two daughters (Lola in 2017 and Billie in 2019), the first of which was born during the filming of Save or Perish.

A film in which the hero played by Pierre Niney is also a father. “Chance meant that I was also going to be a father in life. I had not told the director that my partner was pregnant, out of modesty or probably superstition. When my character becomes a father, inevitably, the link is is done“, he confided in Galabefore discussing his paternity. “Becoming a parent changes your perception of things. It refocuses your priorities. I think, in any case, I would have been shaken by certain situations in the film, but unconsciously, it must have created something in me even more strong”.