Gabriel Axel, who as director of “Babette’s Feast” became the first Dane to win an Oscar for best foreign film, died Feb. 9. He was 95.
A daughter, Karin Moerch, announced the death but did not say where he died or give the cause of death.
Mr. Axel, who was born April 18, 1918, in Aarhus, Denmark, divided his time between his homeland and France. He grew up in Paris, where his father owned a factory, and at age 18, he returned to Denmark to work as a furniture carpenter.
But he was drawn to the theater, and he enrolled in the Danish Royal Theater Actors’ School, graduating in 1945.
Mr. Axel was born Gabriel Axel Moerch, but he dropped his last name when he joined the theater troupe of French film and stage artist Louis Jouvet in Paris.
Mr. Axel directed several large projects for French television and then returned to Denmark to produce series for Denmark’s public broadcasting organization and direct several films in the 1950s and 1960s. He also acted in films.
His international breakthrough came in 1987 with “Babette’s Feast,” based on a novel by Danish writer Karen Blixen, who wrote under the name Isak Dinesen. The movie is about a 19th-century Parisian woman, played by French actress Stephan Audran, who finds shelter in a remote, puritanical Danish village.
Mr. Axel’s works include “Prince of Jutland,” a 1994 film that tells the story of Amled, the Danish prince whose life inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
In 2003, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Copenhagen International Film Festival.
Mr. Axel’s wife of nearly 50 years, Lucie Axel Moerch, died in 1996. Survivors include their four children and eight grandchildren.
— Associated Press
