Adèle Haenel

Adèle Haenel is a French actress who came out as lesbian in 2014 — acknowledging her then partner, director Céline Sciamma, whom she met making Water Lilies (2007) — and became one of French cinema's most honored and most defiant figures. She won two César Awards, for Suzanne (2013) and Love at First Fight (2014), starred in the AIDS-activism drama BPM (Beats per Minute) (2017), and gave an internationally celebrated performance as Héloïse in Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). In 2019 she publicly accused director Christophe Ruggia of sexually harassing her when she was a minor, helping ignite France's #MeToo reckoning, and at the 2020 César ceremony she walked out in protest when Roman Polanski was named best director. In 2023 she announced her retirement from acting, writing that she had decided to politicize her exit to denounce the industry's "generalized complacency toward sexual aggressors." Haenel remains a singular emblem of queer integrity in European cinema — an artist who repeatedly put principle above career.