Émilie Dequenne, who has died from a rare adrenal cancer aged 43, was an expressive Belgian performer who won the Cannes Best Actress prize at seventeen for her debut role: that of a disenfranchised teenager struggling to keep her head above the poverty line in brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta (1999).
With a rigorous realism, the film enshrined its waffle-making heroine’s resilience and resourcefulness, while also lamenting the tough choices forced upon her by circumstance. Her tomboyish features hardening like batter, Dequenne made a credible grafter, clinging tenaciously to Rosetta’s bedtime mantra (“I have a normal life, I won’t be left behind”) even as her fortunes took several turns for the worse.
A tearful Dequenne dedicated her Cannes gong to the aunt who’d insisted she audition: “I wanted to respond to casting ads, but I was a little nervous about doing it because you don't really know who you’ll run into in Belgium.” The Dardennes, however, had been so struck by Dequenne’s inner force they’d cast her twenty minutes into said audition; here, as Luc observed, was “someone who had fire in her belly”.
The performance that resulted was equally physical and intuitive; Dequenne told Cahiers du Cinéma “the role was so realistic, you couldn’t play it, only live it”. Yet that placed clear burdens on one so relatively inexperienced, leading the actress to develop what she called “my little ritual” after each day’s filming: “I took off my shoes, ran a bath, and phoned my mother and insisted we talk about anything else.”
Émilie Dequenne was born on August 29, 1981 in Beloeil in the Wallonia region, the oldest of two daughters to carpenter Daniel Dequenne and his wife Brigitte. Though the formerly industrialised province of Hainaut, where the family lived, was no cosmopolitan hotspot (“you had to travel 25km to go see a film”), Dequenne grew up in very different circumstances to the put-upon Rosetta. “I was always dancing and singing on tables,” she told The Guardian in 2013. “I loved clowning about.”
She studied diction and elocution at the Académie de Musique in Baudour and attended the theatre workshop La Relève in Ladeuze, where she made her stage debut in a production Jean-Paul Alègre’s Comment le Grand Cirque Traviata se transforma en petit navire.
After Rosetta, fully two years passed until Dequenne reappeared, this time resplendent in lipstick amid the effects-driven fantasy-horror Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001). It was a rare genre excursion for an actress who thereafter specialised in French-language auteur cinema, several examples of which crossed the Channel.
Dequenne’s forte became knotty characterisations that defied her cherubic looks: Strindberg’s Miss Julie at the Théâtre Marigny, Paris while she was in her mid-twenties, the victim of an alleged anti-Semitic attack in André Téchiné’s based-on-true-events drama The Girl on the Train (La fille du RER, 2009). She excelled in Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children (À perdre la raison, 2012), as a vulnerable young mother driven to murderous extremes.
She turned up as a sympathetic copper in the first series of the French-set BBC1 hit The Missing (2014-16), then returned to the cinema, winning a César for her supporting role as a betrayed wife in Emmanuel Mouret’s Love Affair(s) (Les choses qu’on dit, les choses qu’on fait, 2020) and playing the grieving mother in Lukas Dhont’s arthouse success Close (2022).
After making her diagnosis public in August 2023, she continued to work, returning to Cannes last May to mark Rosetta’s 25th anniversary and promote the post-apocalyptic thriller Survive (Survivre, 2024), in which she battled killer crabs. Her final film was the Belgian bullying drama TKT (2024).
In December 2024, Dequenne gave her final interview to the TF1 show Sept à huit, where she reflected on the return of a cancer that had previously gone into remission, and her new, thirty-pills-a-day treatment: “Deep down, I know perfectly well that I will not live as long as expected… I am only 43 years old. I have always dreamed of living until at least eighty and then drifting off in my sleep. That is what I pray for.”
She is survived by her husband, the actor Michel Ferracci, and by a daughter, the actress and artist Milla Savarese, from an earlier relationship with the DJ Alexandre Savarese.
Émilie Dequenne, born August 29, 1981, died March 16, 2025.
