Émilie Dequenne: “My world is collapsing, I tell myself that I am going to die”

On August 27, three months after announcing that she was in remission, Emilie Dequenne announced on Instagram that the cancer had returned and that she would once again have to put her career on hold to devote herself to her health. It was during a follow-up visit that the verdict fell: “I saw my doctor to check the progress of the treatment and it turns out that unfortunately, it is not progressing well,” she confided on Sunday, to Audrey Crespo-Mara, in “Sept à Huit”. “There is a part of my cancer that responds and another part that does not respond, or even progresses.”

A much less violent blow, however, than the one she received in August 2023, when her diagnosis was announced. “I was terrified,” she says. “I felt like I was given six months to live.” So much so that she writes her will and “her wishes”. “My world is collapsing, I tell myself I’m going to die.”

The one who now takes around thirty pills a day and is hospitalized every three weeks for her chemotherapy knows “perfectly” that she will “not live as long as expected”. And has a moving thought for his parents: “What's funny is that I'm married, I have a grown-up daughter, my husband has two boys, but when we tell you that, we think of his parents, of self”.

But she continues to fight, wanting to work to avoid the death she often thinks about. But she thinks that she “scares the productions, the directors”. She says she was supposed to play a leading role in a film when she learned that her cancer had returned. She decides to play the transparency card and warns the director who insists that she still have a small role in this film. An immense joy for the Belgian actress who will quickly become disillusioned. “It was while surfing the Internet that I discovered that I had been replaced and that I had not been informed”…

Today, she testifies because she “needs” to talk about her illness. “I am very surrounded, but in suffering, there is a form of extreme solitude.”

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