Nadia Fares remained in an artificial coma on Thursday after being found unconscious on April 12 at the bottom of a pool in a Paris gym, as the Paris prosecutor’s office said investigators were favoring a cardiac event. The case has been handed to police in the IXe arrondissement, and the office said no offense has been identified at this stage.
A swimmer who rushed to help the 57-year-old actress was questioned by police on Monday. According to Le Parisien, Fares was not breathing and appears to have remained underwater for between three and four minutes. Prosecutors also said several people had seen her at the bottom of the water in a yoga position.
The name Nadia Fares has long been familiar to French film audiences. Born in Marrakech in 1968, she grew up in Nice before moving to Paris to try to build an artistic career. She began acting in the 1990s, broke through with Les rivières pourpres in 2001, stepped away from work in 2009 for personal reasons, and returned in 2016 in the Netflix series Marseille.
For now, the central question is not what role made her famous, but how a routine swim ended in a medical emergency so severe that she was still in intensive care on Thursday. The investigation remains open, but the prosecutor’s office has said it does not see evidence of a criminal act at this stage.
