Celia Imrie Says Lucky to Be Alive After Nice Attack
Celia Imrie said she was “lucky to be alive” after revisiting the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice, where she was on the Promenade des Anglais watching fireworks with friends. The English actress, 73, described the moment she realised something was wrong as a 19-tonne cargo truck drove into crowds on 14 July 2016.
She said, “Therefore, I was there down on the Promenade enjoying the fireworks with friends.” A second line made the danger immediate: “I realised something was wrong when a rather handsome young couple came running towards me.” The attack killed 86 people and injured 458 others, and Imrie’s account places her inside the same crowd that was hit.
Nice and the Promenade des Anglais
The Bastille Day attack turned a public celebration into a mass-casualty event in one of Nice’s best-known locations. Imrie’s recollection does more than restate the scale of the attack; it shows how quickly a crowded holiday event can shift from routine to flight, with the first warning arriving not from authorities but from people running toward her.
For readers, the practical value is in the sequence she gives: she was on the promenade, she was with friends, and she sensed danger when the crowd changed direction. That is the clearest account in the material of where she was and what tipped her off before the truck attack unfolded.
Imrie at 73 in 2025
Imrie’s testimony lands alongside a busy 2025 run that included a return to the small screen with Celebrity Traitors and a streaming appearance in Netflix’s The Thursday Murder Club. The source also frames her as an actor who has kept working into her seventies, after earlier interview material published in April 2018 was revisited for this piece.
That context matters because the Nice memory is not being pulled from a distant career footnote; it is being revisited by an actress who is still active on screen. Her quote keeps the focus on survival, not nostalgia, and that is the right call here. The account is strongest when it stays with the Promenade, the friends, and the split second when she saw people running toward her.
