Award-winning Belgian actor Émilie Dequenne has died, aged 43

Émilie Dequenne, the award-winning Belgian actress, has died at the age of 43.

The news was confirmed by her family to the French news agency AFP (via The Guardian), who stated that she passed away on Sunday (March 16) in a hospital outside Paris. She had revealed in October 2023 that she had been diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma, a cancer of the adrenal glands.

Dequenne broke through with her performance in the 1999 Dardenne Brothers film Rosetta, where she played a teenager who lives in a caravan park with her alcoholic mother and strives for a path out of her predicament. She won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, while the film picked up the prestigious Palme d’Or award.

She was only 18 years old at the time that film was released, but it launched her career. She went on to star in several other acclaimed French language films over the following two and a half decades, notably The Girl On The Train in 2009 opposite Catherine Deneuve.

Her performance in Our Children in 2012 – where she co-starred with Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup, in a film which saw her play a Belgian woman who has killed all five of her children – earned her the Best Actress prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard category.

She achieved significant commercial success with Christophe Gans’ historical epic Brotherhood Of The Wolf in 2001, and she picked up a César Award – the French equivalent of an Oscar – for her role in 2020’s Love Affair(s).

Dequenne returned to Cannes in 2024 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Rosetta, while she was promoting the English-language disaster film Survive, which would turn out to be her final role.

Luc Dardenne paid tribute to Dequenne: “Acting was her life,” he said. “She was an actress who could have done many things and whom people loved. She was intuitive, but she worked hard, she loved working, starting over, finding something else and we loved it too.”

Dequenne is survived by her husband, the author Michel Ferracci, and her daughter Milla Savarese.

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