Video Icon
VIDEO

Sofie Gråbøl: How I survived my year of darkness

The star of The Killing is back in Fortitude, a £25m TV thriller, but only after her battle with breast cancer, she tells our chief TV critic

When the third series of the cult Danish thriller The Killing ended two years ago it left its famous detective heading into exile. Finding herself alone in a car with a child killer about to escape justice, Detective Sarah Lund delivered her own. Blowing his brains out cost her a job, a lover and a son. The final shots were of Lund, blank-faced, on a plane to Iceland.

A few months afterwards, Sofie Gråbøl the actress who in playing Lund had created an icon of feminine strength — and sold thousands of Faroese jumpers — was diagnosed with breast cancer. There followed surgery, chemotherapy and then reconstruction. From new year 2013 to new year 2014 she was sick. Then, just three weeks after her last