Émilie Dequenne, Cannes Best Actress Winner for ‘Rosetta,’ Dies at 43 – Variety
By
Ellise Shafer
Émilie Dequenne, the Belgian actor who won a Cannes Film Festival prize for her breakout role in the Dardenne Brothers’ 1999 film “Rosetta,” died on Sunday. She was 43.
Dequenne’s family confirmed to French news agency AFP (via The Guardian) on Sunday night that she died of a rare cancer in a hospital just outside Paris. She revealed in October 2023 that she had been diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma, a cancer of the adrenal glands in the kidney.
Born in Belœil, Belgium on Aug. 29, 1981, Dequenne was just 18 when she broke out in “Rosetta,” a coming-of-age story about a teenager who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother. Her performance earned her Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious best actress award, and “Rosetta” also won the Palme d’Or at the 1999 festival.
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Her next role was in Christophe Gans’ commercially successful “Brotherhood of the Wolf” (2001), and she went on to star in a mix of mainstream and indie fare including Philippe Lioret’s “The Light” (2004), the 2009 drama “The Girl on the Train” alongside Catherine Deneuve and Franck Richard’s 2010 horror film “The Pack.” In 2012, she once again garnered critical acclaim for her turn in Joachim Lafosse’s psychological drama “Our Children,” in which she played a Belgian woman who killed all five of her children. The film took her back to Cannes, where she won the best actress prize in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section.
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Dequenne’s other notable credits include the Belgian rom-com “Not My Type” (2014), political drama “This Is Our Land” (2017), Emmanuel Mouret’s “Love Affair(s)” (2020) and Lukas Dhont’s coming-of-age drama “Close” (2022). Last year, she once again returned to Cannes to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Rosetta.” Her final film was the English-language disaster movie “Survive.”
Luc Dardenne, one of the many personalities who paid tribute to Dequenne on Monday, said in an interview with France Info radio that she was “really too young, she had so many things to do.”
“Acting was her life. She was an actress who could have done many things and whom people loved,” said Dardenne, who directed her when she was 18 in “Rosetta.” “She was intuitive,” said the two-time Palme d’Or winner, “but she worked hard, she loved working, starting over, finding something else and we loved it too.”
She is survived by her husband, the author Michel Ferracci, and her daughter, Milla Savarese, whom she had with previous partner Alexandre Savarese.
Elsa Keslassy contributed to this report.
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