émilie Dequenne, the Belgian actress acclaimed for her breakout role in the Dardenne Brothers' Rosetta, has died at the age of 43. Her family confirmed on Sunday that she passed away at a hospital just outside Paris following a battle with a rare adrenal gland cancer, adrenocortical carcinoma.
Dequenne first captured international attention in 1999, starring as the title character in Rosetta, a coming-of-age drama depicting a teenager's struggle to escape poverty while living in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother. At just 18 years old, her performance earned her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, while the film took home the Palme d'Or. Her work in Rosetta has been lauded as one of the defining performances of her generation.
In the years following her breakout, Dequenne built a diverse career in European cinema. She starred alongside Catherine Deneuve in The Girl on the Train (2009) and gained further acclaim for her role in Joachim Lafosse's psychological drama Our Children (2012). For her portrayal of a woman suffering from severe mental health struggles in Our Children, she won the Best Actress award in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.
Her filmography also includes roles in Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), The Pack (2010), Not My Type (2014), and This Is Our Land (2017). Most recently, she appeared in Lukas Dhont's Close (2022) and starred in the English-language thriller Survive, which was her final film project.
Luc Dardenne, who directed Dequenne in Rosetta, paid tribute to her on Monday. Speaking to France Info radio, Dardenne said: 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. She was intuitive, but she worked hard, she loved working, starting over, finding something else and we loved it too."
In October 2023, Dequenne publicly revealed she had been diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma. She initially responded well to treatment and announced in April 2024 that she had been given the all-clear. However, the cancer returned later in the year, and she acknowledged in interviews that she likely would not live as long as she had hoped.
In one of her final interviews, Dequenne reflected on filming Survive before her diagnosis. "I didn't know I was sick by the time I was shooting the movie, and I got sick almost like six or eight months later. I'm still fighting, I'm still on chemo for now, but I'm okay, I'm okay," she told The Action.
Her social media posts in her final months frequently expressed gratitude toward her family, particularly her husband, author Michel Ferracci, whom she married in 2014. She is also survived by her daughter, 22-year-old actress Milla Savarese, from a previous relationship with Alexandre Savarese.
In a heartfelt message marking World Cancer Day, Dequenne wrote, "What a tough fight! And we don't choose. Just writing these few words is an oversized effort. THANK YOU again to my family... my amazing parents, my friends."
