Émilie Dequenne, award-winning actress, passes away

Émilie Dequenne, the celebrated Belgian actress whose scene-stealing debut in Rosetta (1999) remains among the most indelible moments in contemporary European cinema, has died at 43. She died on March 16 at a hospital outside Paris after a long struggle with adrenocortical carcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer of the adrenal gland. The news was confirmed by her family and her agent, and it prompted an outpouring of tributes across the film industry.

Born on Aug. 29, 1981, in Beloeil, Wallonia, Dequenne was attracted to the performing arts as a child. During her teens she studied acting and public speaking, before contributing scenework to the La Relève theatre troupe. She became a shockingly early casting for Rosetta the Dardenne brothers’ grim depiction of working class life in Belgium when she was only17. Her performance as a fierce, ambitious teenager determined to break free of poverty while raising an alcoholic mother was a revelation. She won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival that year for the performance, given by a jury that included the director David Cronenberg. The film also took the Palme d’Or, launching Dequenne into the international limelight.

In the two decades that followed, Dequenne became a fixture of Belgian and French cinema, accumulating more than 60 screen credits and wide critical acclaim. She featured in The Brotherhood Of The Wolf (2001), a genre-blending action-horror hit from director Christophe Gans, and she won further acclaim for her devastating performance in Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children (2012), which bagged her the Un Certain Regard Best Actress award at Cannes. In This Is Our Land (2017), she portrayed a small-town nurse drawn into the orbit of a far-right political party, a performance that earned her a Magritte Award for Best Actress. She also appeared in the César-winning romantic drama The Things We Say, The Things We Do (2020) and had a supporting role in Lukas Dhont’s Oscar-nominated film Close (2022).

Dequenne also appeared in a handful of English-language films, including The Bridge Of San Luis Rey (2004), opposite Robert De Niro and Gabriel Byrne, and most recently in Frédéric Jardin’s survival thriller Survive (2024). Her last appearance was in TKT (2024), a Belgian film about the consequences of bullying in schools, in which she played the mother of a boy placed in a coma.

Her husband, the director and producer Michel Ferracci, who she married in 2014, and her daughter, Milla Savarese, survive her. In her last public statement from late 2023, Dequenne discussed her illness openly and with hope and fortitude, stating she was “ready to fight.” She leaves a legacy of honesty, empathy and cinematic bravery.