Yahoo Lifestyle Émilie Dequenne Dies: Belgian Cannes Best Actress Winner Was 43
Émilie Dequenne, the Belgian actress who first achieved fame with her 1999 Cannes d’Or-winning, big screen debut in Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s drama Rosetta, has died at the age 43.
The actress, who revealed in October 2023 that she was battling a rare adrenal gland cancer, died in hospital on the outskirts of Paris on Sunday evening, her agent Danielle Gain announced to AFP.
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Born on August 29, 1981, Dequenne studied at Belgium’s Music & Spoken Word Academy in Baudour from an early age, taking up drama there at the age of 12, alongside joining the La Relève Theater troupe.
She landed her first cinema role at age 17 in Rosetta. She clinched Best Actress at Cannes in 1999 for her performance as the titular teenager living in a caravan with an alcoholic mother in the film, which also won the Dardenne brothers their first Palme d’Or.Luc Dardenne told French radio station FranceInfo on Monday, morning.
“It’s terrible, life is disgusting sometimes,” Luc Dardenne told French radio station FranceInfo on Monday, morning, the day after the actress’s death. “That’s too young, she still had so much to do.”
Talking about the casting session with a 17-year-old Dequenne for Rosetta, he recalled: “She came in high heels, heavily made up, her hair done up… For her, it was an event, she thought she had to be really well dressed.”
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“We started the scenes and we saw she was magnificent, she was there, everything she did, we felt that the camera loved her,” he added.
Dequenne enjoyed a high-profile career throughout the 2000s, appearing in Christophe Gans’ historic thriller The Brotherhood of the Wolf and Claude Berri’s The Housekeeper as well as making a foray into English-language movies with Mary McGuckian’s costume drama The Bridge of San Luis Rey, starring Gabriel Byrne, Robert de Niro and Cathy Bates.
Dequenne’s 61 acting credits also include her more recent Best Supporting Actress César-winning performance in Emmanuel Mouret’s couple drama The Things We Say, The Things We Do.
Other career highlights, included Joachim Lafosse’s 2012 psychological family drama Our Children, opposite Tahar Rahim; Lucas Belvaux’s 2018 rise of the far-right drama This Is Our Land, for which she won a Belgian Magritte for Best Actress, and Lukas Dhont’s Oscar-nominated film Close.
The actress was last seen on the big screen last fall in the Belgian high school bullying drama TKT in the role of the mother of a young victim who lands in a coma.
Dequenne is survived by her second husband, the actor Michel Ferracci, and her 23-year daughter Milla, with Belgian DJ Alexandre Savarese, her partner from 1999 to 2005.
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