I arrived at the Stieg Larsson party a little late. For a while I’d been noticing the Millennium trilogy in Italian translation, stacked up in huge pyraminds in bookshops all over Rome, impossible to miss, but for some reason I resisted the marketing push. It was my writer friend Adam Williams who finally gave me the nudge I needed when he included the books in his end-of-year must-reads email in December 2009, and that was that. Like everyone else who picked them up, I was instantly hooked, devoured all three, and then mourned the fact that Larsson’s planned series of ten novels would never be finished. He had died in November 2004, just months after delivering the manuscripts, never knowing that his books would become a global publishing sensation.
Noomi Rapace‘s portrayal of Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish film adaptations is, for me, just perfect. She inhabited that character in a way that felt visceral and entirely her own, somehow managing to pull off the near-impossible feat of nailing a character that every reader already has their own very clear picture of. So when she turned up at the Rome Film Festival in October 2011, I was there to see if I could get an autograph.
She had come to Rome for the premiere of Babycall, a Norwegian psychological thriller directed by Pål Sletaune. The critics at the time were a little divided on the film itself, but universally agreed that Rapace was extraordinary in it, and the jury awarded her the Marc’Aurelio Best Actress prize, which felt entirely deserved. I was lucky enough to attend the screening and applaud her performance as the credits rolled.
On a side note … That jury was led by Ennio Morricone. I spotted him more than once that week simply sitting in the stalls watching films with the regular audience, enjoying the programme like everyone else. It feels rather poignant now, given that the Auditorium Parco della Musica where the festival is held was renamed the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone in 2020, a fitting tribute to the legendary film composer.
Back to Noomi on the red carpet! I had with me my extremely well-thumbed copy of the Maclehose Press film tie-in paperback version of The Girl Who Played with Fire in English translation, with Rapace as Salander on the cover, and she was kind enough to sign it — the video is below if you’d like to see the moment she signs my book (roughly at the 1 minute 25 second mark).
It’s a slightly unusual object to have in a collection of signed books, since it isn’t signed by an author at all, but it feels like a genuine piece of the Millennium story told from a different angle. Larsson himself died months before his novels were even published, so signed copies of his work are essentially non-existent, and this tie-in paperback signed by the actress who became Lisbeth Salander for so many readers worldwide — collected in person at a festival where she happened to be picking up a major award that same week — is a great piece to own.
Rapace has had quite a year in 2026, receiving the Honorary Nordic Dragon Award at Göteborg Film Festival in January, where a career retrospective included The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo among her most celebrated work, and earning considerable attention for her portrayal of Mother Teresa in the film Mother. It’s a remarkable career trajectory, and it all started, really, with her portrayal of that leather-clad hacker from Stockholm.