Award-winning Belgian actress Émilie Dequenne has died from cancer at the age of 43.
Dequenne shot to fame when she won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival at the age of 18 for the film Rosetta in 1999.
She won another Cannes award for À Perdre la Raison (Our Children) in 2012, and received a Cesar, one of France’s top film honours, for Les Choses Qu’on Dit, les Choses Qu’on Fait (The Things We Say, the Things We Do) in 2021.
She mainly acted in French-language films but also appeared as police officer Laurence Relaud in 2014 BBC TV drama The Missing.
Rosetta, a poignant tale about a teenager’s struggle to overcome a life of misery, was Dequenne’s first screen role.
She had been unemployed after losing her job in a food factory when she was picked for the role.
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“The first day she filmed in front of a real camera, she managed to bring the whole team together,” Luc Dardenne, who directed it with his brother Jean-Pierre, said in a tribute to broadcaster RTBF.
“It got better and better as the shoot progressed… She was magnificent and the film owes a lot to her.”
Getty ImagesIn The Missing, she played Laurence Relaud, which starred James Nesbitt as the father of a boy who disappears during a family holiday.
Her other films included 2009’s La fille du RER (The Girl on the Train), 2014’s Pas Son Genre (Not My Type) and 2022 Cannes nominee Close.
Others paying tribute included French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati, who wrote: “Francophone cinema has lost, too soon, a talented actress who still had so much to offer.”
Dequenne revealed in October 2023 that she was suffering from adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC), a cancer of the adrenal gland.
In one of her last Instagram posts, for World Cancer Day in February, she wrote: “What a tough fight! And we don’t choose…”
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