Noomi Rapace invented new last name when she married

Noomi Rapace invented a new last name for herself when she got married.

The 44-year-old ‘Prometheus’ star was born Noomi Noren but she decided to change her name when she exchanged vows with Par Ola Norell in 2001 – with the couple deciding they would both be known as “Rapace” which means bird of prey in both French and Italian and they passed it on to their son Lev when he was born in 2003.

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Noomi said of the decision: “I’m very spontaneous. I don’t overthink stuff: ‘Let’s go! Let’s do it’. And there was something in me that very strongly connected with the name.”

She added: “My son said once, when we just moved to London, he was eating breakfast, and I was shooting ‘Sherlock Holmes’ with Guy Ritchie, and getting ready, running my lines as Simza, my fortune-teller character, and he looked up at me and was like: ‘Mummy, do you know I’m the first-born Rapace in the world?’ So yeah, I think I picked pretty well.”

Noomi and Ola split in 2010, but they both kept the name.

In the interview, the actress went on to reveal she never expected to make it in Hollywood because she lived a sheltered life growing up on a farm in Sweden where she didn’t have a TV or a radio and only had four CDs to play.

She explained: “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, only me sitting in the pickup truck playing my CDs.

“I had four CDs: Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Dolly Parton, and a weird Icelandic band called KK. So I was obsessed with Bruce Springsteen when I was little, and just dreaming of connecting with the world.”