Émilie Dequenne, Star of Palme d’Or Winner ‘Rosetta,’ Dies at 43

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Émilie Dequenne, the Belgian actress who won received the best actress trophy at Cannes for her breakout role in the Dardenne brothers’ Palme d’Or-winning drama Rosetta, has died. She was 43.

Dequenne died Sunday in a hospital outside Paris after battling adrenocortical carcinoma, a rare cancer of the adrenal gland, her family and agent announced.

Born on Aug. 29, 1981, in Belgium, Dequenne began studying drama at 12 and trained at the Music & Spoken Word Academy in Baudour before joining the La Relève Theater troupe. At 17, she was cast in Rosetta, playing a working-class teenager struggling to escape poverty. Her performance earned her the Cannes best actress prize in 1999 (shared with Séverine Caneele for Humanité), launching a career in European cinema.

She was a feature in French and Belgian films for decades, with more than 60 acting credits to her name. Highlights included Christophe Gans’ action horror thriller The Brotherhood of the Wolf; Joachim Lafosse’s psychological family drama Our Children (2012), with a performance that won her best actress in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section; Lucas Belvaux’s 2018 This Is Our Land, playing a small-town nurse recruited as a mayoral candidate by a far-right reactionary party, for which she won a Belgian Magritte for best actress; Emmanuel Mouret’s couple drama The Things We Say, The Things We Do (2020), in which she had a César-winning best supporting actress performance; and Lukas Dhont’s Oscar-nominated Belgian drama Close (2022).

Her English-language work included The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004), starring Gabriel Byrne and Robert De Niro, and Frédéric Jardin’s disaster thriller Survive (2024). The actress was last seen on the big screen in the Belgian high school bullying drama TKT (2024) in the role of the mother of a young victim who lands in a coma.

Dequenne is survived by her second husband, actor Michel Ferracci, and her 23-year daughter, Milla. She was married to Belgian DJ Alexandre Savarese from 1999-2005.

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2025-03-17 17:59