Adèle Haenel

Adèle Haenel ([adɛl enɛl]; born 11 February 1989) is a French actress.

Haenel began her career as a child actress and quickly rose to prominence in the French entertainment industry. She has been nominated at the César Awards seventimes, winning twice for her performances in Suzanne and Love at First Fight.

Haenel is also known for her long personal and professional relationship with director Céline Sciamma and appeared in her films Water Lilies, Pauline, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Haenel was born and raised in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis. She has Austrian heritage through her father and speaks some German. As a child she was involved in local theatre.

Haenel began her film career as the lead in the film Les Diables in 2002. In 2019 she revealed that after being systematically sexually harassed by the director of the film, Christophe Ruggia, she decided to abandon acting. After making the film Haenel did not act again for 5 years, however after a chance encounter with Christel Baras, the casting director who had cast her in Les Diables, she was persuaded to continue acting. Baras helped cast her in the 2007 film Water Lilies for which Haenel was subsequently nominated for a César Award for Most Promising Actress in 2008. She was nominated in the same category in 2012 for House of Tolerance (2011).

In 2014, Haenel was awarded the César Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Suzanne, and in 2015, she won the César Award for Best Actress for performance in the film Love at First Fight.

In 2016 Haenel made her German language debut in the film The Bloom of Yesterday playing the French descendant of German Holocaust survivors.

Haenel received a nomination for the César Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in BPM (Beats per Minute).

In 2019 Haenel was again nominated for the César Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Trouble with You. That same year she appeared in three films which played at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival: Deerskin, Heroes Don't Die and Portrait of a Lady on Fire directed by Haenel's frequent collaborator Céline Sciamma. Haenel was nominated for the César Award for Best Actress for the film, receiving her seventh nomination.

In 2014 Haenel revealed she was in a romantic relationship with director Céline Sciamma, whom she met on the set of Water Lilies, by publicly acknowledging their relationship in her acceptance speech for her César award for Suzanne. The couple amicably split in 2018, shortly before they began work on Portrait of a Lady on Fire. In 2018 she was in a relationship with musician and singer Julia Lanoë from the band Sexy Sushi.

In 2019 Haenel gave an interview accusing director Christophe Ruggia [fr] of sexually harassing her from the time she was 12 to 15 after casting her in his film Les Diables. Her account was backed up by many people who had worked on the film and noted Ruggia's inappropriate behavior towards her, along with letters he had written her at the time proclaiming his love for her. As a result Ruggia was expelled from the Société des réalisateurs de films, the guild for French directors. Though Haenel had explicitly chosen not to go to the police with her accusations, citing the justice system as "usually condemning so few sexual offenders" and "only one rape out of a hundred" and stating that "the justice ignores us, we ignore the justice.", the publicity garnered by her interviews about the abuse led the Paris prosecutor's office to announce they were investigating Ruggia. Haenel later changed her mind about working with the police and officially filed a complaint against Ruggia in late November of 2019. In January of 2020 the police officially charged Ruggia with sexual aggression against a minor by a person of authority and sexual harassment.