Actress Émilie Dequenne dies at 43

BarcelonaBelgian actress Émilie Dequenne has died at the age of 43 in France after suffering from a rare cancer. Dequenne, born in Beloeil, Wallonia, on August 29, 1981, made her film debut in the film Rosetta, directed by the Dardenne brothers. With that role, she won the Best Actress Award at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival and began a career that would lead her to work in more than fifty films and twenty television series and TV movies, most of them French. Among her most notable feature films are The Pact of the Wolves (2001), directed by Christophe Gans, and The Girl on the Train (2009), the big screen adaptation of best-seller by Paula Hawkins. In 2012 she triumphed again at the Cannes Film Festival with Until losing the path, by Joachim Lafosse, for which he won again the award for best actressDequenne also participated in Not her type (2014) and The things we say, the things we do (2021), with which she won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2021.

One of her last appearances on the big screen was in The English Butler (2024), by Gilles Legardinier. Dequenne plays the role of a cook with a bad temper which is at the moral antipodes of RosettaIn October 2023, the actress explained that she had been diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma for two months and that, as a result of the disease, she had stopped working. At last year's Cannes Film Festival, the actress decided to make a comeback to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her debut, accompanied by the Dardenne brothers. There, she also promoted Survive, by Frédéric Jardin, which was the last film he worked on.