17-03-2025
Celebrated Actor Dead at 43 Following Battle With Rare Cancer
Internationally renowned actor Émilie Dequenne has died at 43 following a battle with a rare cancer, The Guardian reported. Dequenne revealed in Oct. 2023 that she was suffering from adrenocortical carcinoma, a cancer which affects the kidney's adrenal glands. She passed away on Sunday night in a hospital outside of Paris.
Dequenne was a celebrated actor who appeared in a number of French and Belgian films, which found appreciative audiences in America and Canada, in addition to several English-language features. She broke onto the scene in 1999, winning Cannes' Best Actress award for her role in the Dardenne Brothers' social-realist drama Rosetta, about a woman (Dequenne) living in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother. In addition to Dequenne's award, Rosetta won that year's coveted Palme d' is perhaps best-remembered for her role in the 2001 action-horror-fantasy The Brotherhood of the Wolf, which went on to gross nearly $12 million in the States and became the sixth highest-grossing French-language film of all time in the U.S. She also starred in the 2009 drama The Girl on the Train (not to be confused with the 2016 film of the same name starring Emily Blunt) and the Belgian comedy Not My Type (2014). In 2012, Dequenne returned to Cannes with the drama Our Children, for which she took the best actress prize in the festival's Un Certain Regard bracket.
Most recently, Dequenne starred in Lukas Dhont's haunting drama Close, which was nominated for Best International Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards. Her final role was in the English-language film Survival, released last year. She is survived by her husband, author Michel Ferracci; and her daughter Milla Savarese, whom she shares with her former husband Alexandre Savarese.
