In the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian social realist brothers who specialise in studies of life on the breadline, a roving hand-held camera tends to cling to the main character as closely as a shadow. Rosetta (1999), their first picture to feature a female protagonist, follows a tenacious, single-minded teenager who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother on the edge of the desolate town of Seraing. She scratches around for work, poaches fish from a muddy river using worms scooped from the ground as bait and is not above betrayal and back-stabbing to get what she wants, even if it is just a job at a local waffle stand.
The picture was compared favourably to Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967). The brothers described it as “a war film” and Rosetta herself as “a warrior”. Jean-Pierre pointed out that the characters “are always responsible for what they do or don’t do. We don’t treat any of [them] like victims.”
Victimhood would have been a poor fit for the extraordinary Émilie Dequenne, who has died of cancer aged 43. With her shrewd eyes and blunt hexagonal face, she brought a bracingly unsentimental single-mindedness to Rosetta. Her taciturn, tough-nut exterior did not preclude glimpses of the wounded child within.
Dequenne was just 16 when she was cast, and 17 when she was joint winner of the best actress prize at Cannes for her performance. Rosetta also took home the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.
Dequenne had worked in theatre before, but Rosetta was her first screen appearance. She was chosen by the Dardennes from among 300 applicants. “The brothers were amused by her letter – ‘wildly pretentious’, they say, still smiling at her chutzpah,” reported the critic Jonathan Romney in 2000. “She came in high heels, heavily made up, her hair done up,” said Luc. “For her, it was an event, she thought she had to be really well-dressed. We started the scenes and we saw she was magnificent, she was there, everything she did, we felt that the camera loved her.”
The performance is all the more astounding, Romney wrote, because “Dequenne clearly isn’t the film’s stubbornly uncommunicative feral child, but … an articulate and rather glamorous young woman who clearly has her showbiz future sorted out.”
The Dardennes’ working methods were unconventional. For the climactic scene, in which Rosetta tries to kill herself and her mother only to find that the gas in their caravan has run out, she was required to lug heavy gas canisters for the entire five-minute take; the brothers later pointed out that they kindly released five kilos from the 18 kilo container to make her task a little easier. During some shots, actors were prodded with rods during filming to shove them into position while the camera was running.
Rosetta, Dequenne said, “was a small film with a small crew where everybody worked together”. Her next film, Christophe Gans’s spectacular period fantasy Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), could not have been more different. “I didn’t even get to see the director because he was watching everything on his monitor, so I communicated with his assistant.”
Thereafter, she built a career of intelligent choices and authoritative performances. Among the highlights was André Téchiné’s cool-headed, factually based drama The Girl on the Train (2009), in which she starred as a woman who falsely alleges that she has been the victim of an antisemitic attack; Catherine Deneuve played her mother. “It was really about a young woman who had lost her way so completely that she did not know how to get back,” Dequenne said.
More than a decade after Rosetta, she had the lead in a film that exceeded even that one in its rawness and intensity. In Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children (2012), loosely inspired by real events, she played Murielle, a mother who is driven over the edge of sanity by her controlling father-in-law. In the distressing conclusion, she murders her four children.
Dequenne makes this woebegone character sorrowful without pleading for the audience’s pity, and shows her to be a bright woman whose spirit is finally crushed. She also rises to the colossal task of visualising the exact point of Murielle’s breakdown. In an unbroken three-and-a-half-minute close-up, she sings along to the radio as she drives, her melodious voice gradually racked with sobs. “Making a film like that is something that you have to survive,” Dequenne said.
The survivors of the tragedy that inspired the picture accused her and Lafosse of being “exploiters”. Writing in the Observer, Philip French called Our Children “part Greek tragedy, part case history, part admonitory social parable about class, race and colonialism”. The scene in which Murielle slips a knife into her handbag while shopping with her children was, he said, “as chilling as anything I’ve ever seen in the cinema”.
Dequenne was born in Beloeil, Belgium, to Brigitte and Daniel, a carpenter. She attended the Académie de Musique et des Arts de la Parole in nearby Saint-Ghislain from the age of 12, and got her earliest acting experience in a local theatre workshop.
A rare English-language role came her way in Mary McGuckian’s historical drama The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004) – adapted from Thornton Wilder’s novel – set in 18th-century Peru and co-starring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Kathy Bates. In the BBC drama The Missing (2014), she played a translator.
In recent years, she won a Magritte award for her performance as a well-meaning but credulous nurse caught up in far right politics in Lucas Belvaux’s This Is Our Land (2017). She won a César for the infidelity drama The Things We Say, The Things We Do (2020), also known as Love Affair(s), and played a grieving parent in Lukas Dhont’s Oscar-nominated tearjerker Close (2022). Her last screen role came in TKT (2024), a Belgian drama about school bullying.
She is survived by her husband, Michel Ferracci, as well as by a daughter, Milla Savarese, from an earlier relationship with the DJ Alexandre Savarese.
• Émilie Dequenne, actor, born 29 August 1981; died 16 March 2025
