Émilie Dequenne

Orig­i­nal­ly from the province of Hain­aut, in Bel­gium, Émi­lie Dequenne took children’s the­ater class­es before mak­ing her screen debut at age 17 in the Dar­d­enne Broth­ers’ dra­ma Roset­ta. Pre­sent­ed in com­pe­ti­tion at the 1999 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, the film won the Palme d’Or and earned Émi­lie Dequenne the Best Actress Award for her very first role. She soon fol­lowed up with Christophe Gans’ block­buster Broth­er­hood of the Wolf (2001), then filmed Claude Berri’s com­e­dy The House­keep­er (2002) with Jean-Pierre Bacri. In the years that fol­lowed, the actress head­lined, among oth­ers, social dra­mas The Girl on the Train by André Téch­iné (2009) and Our Chil­dren by Joachim Lafos­se (2012), for which she won Best Actress Award at the 2012 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val in the Un Cer­tain Regard sec­tion, fol­lowed by Lucas Belvaux’s Not My Type (2014) and This is Our Land (2017), and Pierre Jolivet’s The Brigade (2017). In 2021, Émi­lie Dequenne won the Best Sup­port­ing Actress César for her role in Emmanuel Mouret’s The Things We Say, the Things We Do. Fol­low­ing her per­for­mance in Lukas Dhont’s Close, 2022 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val Grand Prize win­ner, the actress recent­ly appeared in Chris­tine Dory’s The Daugh­ter of Albi­no Rodrigue and Vir­ginie Verrier’s Marinette.