Émilie Dequenne, the Belgian actress best known for her award-winning role in Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s “Rosetta,” died Sunday in Paris, her family announced. She was 43.
Dequenne shared she had been diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma, a rare adrenal gland cancer, in October 2023.
“Rosetta” launched the actress to international acclaim after she won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for the 1999 film. She continued to rack up awards for mostly French-language movies, including 2009’s “The Girl on the Train” and 2012’s “Our Children.”
Dequenne was in attendance at Cannes in 2024 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Rosetta” and to promote her movie “Survive.” In an interview with The Action Elite, Dequenne said she didn’t know she was sick when she filmed the movie.
Dequenne also said that her own experiences as a mother drew her to the movie, a dystopian drama that centers on a family. ” can’t explain, but when you became a mother, it’s like your strength and your power and your braveness completely changed. And you see life through another vision,” she explained. “And that’s what completely attracted me when I read the script, is that for me, it was really realistic, actually despite the fact that, of course, it’s dystopic and I love that.”
She also added that the family’s crew built a sort of family atmosphere for the children who starred in the movie as well. “We had dinner together. When we came back, we were in the same car to go to the set. We were together, always together. And I still got them on the phone. Lisa, who plays my daughter, she’s become a very good friend to my daughter. Sometimes she comes home, she sleeps over, and we spend time together,” Dequenne explained.
The role was something of a return for Dequenne, who often played women who find themselves in tough situations. In a 2013 interview with the Guardian, the actress reflected on our role in “Our Children,” described as one of her “darkest” movies up to that point.
The movie is “loosely” based on a real event, she told the outlet, when a Belgian woman married to a Moroccan husband killed the pair’s five children — just like her character in the film. “But I went to speak to several psychiatrists before I started making the film and they told me that the person who killed her own kids was psychotic – not just depressed or angry but in a very strange and rare place, and that this did not happen to everybody,” she said.
“Just because you shout at your kids, it doesn’t mean that you want to kill them. I had to know this, because I have my own neuroses like everyone else. The story is really an explanation of how Murielle gets to this place. For my part I went home every weekend, and stayed with my family, which is a very safe place. Making a film like that is something that you have to survive,” Dequenne added.
Dequenne appeared to take each role seriously, embodying the characters she portrayed on screen. She starred in 2009’s “La Fille du RER” as a young woman who claimed to have been a victim of an antisemitic attack on the RER D train in Paris — but then admitted she made the entire thing up.
“That film was a massive experience for me,” Dequenne said. “It was really about a young woman who had lost her way so completely that she did not know how to get back. It’s really about self-harm in the most extreme sense.”
Émilie Dequenne was born on August 29, 1981, in Belgium. She is survived by her husband, Michel Ferracci, and her daughter.
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