World Famous in Belgium Trivia Quiz

Answer: Herman Van Molle

Van Molle was born in 1956. After his studies of Germanic languages, he started a career on the Flemish public television. He presented several quiz shows, starting with "De IQ Quiz" (1980-1994). This weekly show, for two teams of two candidates, had a first part with traditional quiz questions alternating with brain teasers, and each good answer gave some seconds on the clock. Then in the finale each team had to use their gained seconds to find one or two long words in a sliding window.
"De Canvas Crack" (2001-2013) had individual quizzers competing head to head in five multiple-choice questions. Defeating twenty opponents would land the top prize.
Van Molle also worked on the satirical show "TV Touché" and the travel show "Zalm voor Corleone".
Adil el Arbi (born 1988) is best known as one half of the movie directors Adil & Bilall (the other being Bilall Fallah, born 1986). Their Hollywood debut was "Bad Boys for Life" (2020), starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.
Yolande Moreau (born 1953) was an actress known for her supporting role in "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain" (2001) and her work in "When the Sea Rises" (2004, also her directing debut).
Pierre Culliford (1928-1992) used the alias Peyo. He wrote and illustrated the popular comic series "Les Schtroumpfs", translated as "The Smurfs".

Answer: Sigiswald Kuijken

Sigiswald Kuijken was born in 1944. He studied violin and started his career in 1964 with the Alarius ensemble. At the end of the sixties he rediscovered the baroque way of playing the violin (held on the shoulder and not under the chin). In 1972 Sigiswald and his brothers started La Petite Bande, a string ensemble using period instruments for the baroque music pieces in which they specialize. Their first record was the opera "Le bourgeois Gentilhomme" by Jean-Baptiste Lully, and they have since then published many records with cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was a movie director most famed for her movie "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975) about an average day in the life of a housewife in a poorer suburb of Brussels.
Willy Vandersteen (1913-1990) was a script writer and illustrator for about a dozen comic series, of which "Suske en Wiske" (translated as "Spike and Suzy") is the best known.
Jeanne Brabants (1920-2014) founded in Antwerp a ballet school and the ballet company Ballet van Vlaanderen, since 2014 merged with the Opera van Vlaanderen (Flemish opera company).

Answer: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

De Keersmaeker (born 1960) studied ballet at the Mudra school led by Maurice Béjart. In 1981 she studied for a while in New York at the Tisch School of the Arts. And in 1983 she founded her own dance company named Rosas. The first performance was "Rosas danst Rosas", a choreography for four dancers.

It is a dance in four movements, each representing a time of day: from night over morning and afternoon to the grand finale. Bikkembergs (born 1959), Demeulemeester (born 1959) and Yee (born 1958) were three members of the famed "Antwerp Six": fashion designers who started their career in Antwerp at the start of the 1980s, at a time when Belgium had no feeling with the international fashion scene.

Answer: Jean Van Hamme

Van Hamme (born 1939) started his career as a journalist. But he soon turned to writing fiction, especially for three well-known comic strip series: "Thorgal" (a fantasy series set in medieval Scandinavia), illustrated by Grzegorz Rosinski; "XIII" (a series about a former special forces officer who lost his memory), illustrated by William Vance; and "Largo Winch" (a series about the heir to a multinational conglomerate, confronted by various criminal organisations), illustrated by Philippe Francq.
Philippe Herreweghe (born 1947) founded the choir Collegium Vocale, specialized in Renaissance and Baroque choir music.
Frieda Van Wijck (born 1950) presented the TV quiz show "De klas van Frieda", in which famous Flemish people had to answer questions from the school curriculum of a fourth grader.
Michèle Noiret (born 1960) has founded an eponymous dance company in 1986.

Answer: Edouard Vermeulen

Vermeulen (born 1957) studied interior decoration. But after a few years he reoriented his career to fashion, and especially wedding dresses. He gained international fame with dresses for the royal families in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. He created for instance the wedding dress of Queen Mathilde of Belgium in 1999 and for Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands in 2001.
Paul Van Nevel (born 1946) founded the Huelgas Ensemble, a choir specialized in a capella music from the middle ages until the Baroque.
Nicole van Goethem (1941-2000) was the first Belgian movie director to win an Oscar - not the highly appreciated Oscar for "Best Foreign Movie", but for best animated short movie. She won her Oscar for "Een Griekse tragedie" ("A Greek Tragedy", 1985).
Ruben Impens (born 1971) gained fame as cameraman for "The Broken Circle Breakdown" (2012) and "Titane" (2021).

Answer: Emilie Dequenne

Dequenne (born 1981) played a young, impoverished girl desperately seeking a job to start a settled life, in this debut movie. Her character had also to worry about her mother, who was highly addicted to alcohol.
Later on Dequenne would also play in movies by the French director André Téchiné ("The Girl on the Train", 2009) and the Belgian director Lucas Belvaux ("Not My Type", 2014 and "This Is Our Land", 2017).
The Cannes film festival in 1999 proved very successful for Belgium. The directors and script writers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne presented their movie "Rosetta", and the movie was awarded the Golden Palm. But also the young actress Emilie Dequenne got an award, that of Best Actress.
Morris is the pseudonym of Maurice De Bever (1923-2001). He is best known for the western comic strip series "Lucky Luke". For several of the stories he collaborated with script writer René Goscinny (the French author famous for "Asterix").
The singer La Esterella (1919-2011) was born as Ester Lambrechts. She was best known for "Oh Lieve Vrouwe Toren", an ode to the tower of the Antwerp cathedral.
Cecilia Callebert (1884-1978) was a pianist and composer. Some of her works were based upon texts written by Theresa of Avila.

Answer: Eugene Ysaye

Ysaye (1858-1931) learned to play the violin at an early age. He studied in Liège under supervision of Henryk Wieniawski and Henri Vieuxtemps, two masters at the violin whom Ysaye would even surpass. Sources claim that Liszt and Anton Rubinstein would attend concertos only to hear Ysaye performing.
Ysaye also took to composing and teaching. When his health did not allow any more performances with the violin, his composing and teaching became a full-time occupation.
Among the many students Ysaye accepted, there was also Queen Elisabeth. She founded the yearly competition (originally named after Eugene Ysaye) for young musicians.
Ben Crabbé (born 1962) was a drummer, but he started presenting the TV quiz show "Blokken" in 1994. This show combined quiz questions with a game of Tetris.
The actress Marie Vinck (born 1983) got her first leading role in "Blazen tot Honderd" (1998). She gained fame with "De Kus" ("The Kiss", 2004).
Veerle Baetens (born 1978), another actress, also played in "De Kus" (2004). But she attracted international fame with "The Broken Circle Breakdown" (2012).

Answer: Gerard Corbiau

Gerard Corbiau (born 1941) started his career with making documentaries for the RTBF (the Walloon public television channel). But he is better known for some of his full-feature movies: "Le maître de la Musique" (1988), "Farinelli" (1994) and "Le roi danse" (2000) - all set in the Baroque era of music.
"Farinelli" was a biopic on one of the most renowned castrato singers of his time, Carlo Broschi. Broschi (1705-1782) toured Europe under the stage name Farinelli and gained much appreciation for his singing in works by Metastasio, Porpora and Handel, to name but a few.
Lionel Meunier (born 1981) was trained as a trumpet player, but founded the choir Vox Luminis in 2004. This choir specializes in German, Italian and English music of the period 1500-1800.
Anja Daems (born 1968) presented a TV quiz show "De Notenclub", in which all questions were based upon pop songs.
Guido Belcanto was born in 1953 as Guido Versmissen. He specialized in singing cabaret songs.

Answer: Nicolas Karakatsanis

Karakatsanis was born in 1977. He started his career in 2003 with some short movies. In 2011 he attracted international attention with his work on the Belgian crime movie "Rundskop". "The Drop" (2014) was his first Hollywood production, starring Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and James Gandolfini. And "Cruella" (2021), the prequel to Disney's animation movie "101 Dalmatians", is another highlight in Karakatsanis' career.
Big Bill or Big Bill Krakkebaas is the stage name of Armand Hombroeckx, a blues singer born in 1950.
Edgar Tinel (1854-1912) was a pianist and composer. He gained fame with his choral "Klokke Roeland".
Lisbeth Gruwez (born 1977) started the dance company Voetvolk (which I would translate as "infantry") in 2007.

Answer: Ozark Henry

Piet Goddaer (born 1970) chose the stage name Ozark Henry, with a clear reference to the Ozark mountain range. He started his career in avant-garde songs, but gradually evolved to mainstream pop-rock with classical influences. His bestselling album during the first 25 years of his career was "The Sailor, Not the Sea" (2004).
Lodewijk Mortelmans (1868-1952) was a composer and conductor, best known for his songs.
Christophe Beaucarne (born 1965) is best known as cinematographer for "Mr. Nobody" and "Coco avant Chanel", both from 2009.
Nicolas Provost (born 1969) was a camera operator specialized in short movies, but he also directed "The Invader" (2011) - a movie that started with a scene inspired by Courbet's painting "The Origin of the World".