Had a little-known Dutch actress called Sylvia Kristel not gone to audition for a soap powder commercial, her name would not have become synonymous with sex. But she did.
And, as she used to tell the story, it was by accidentally knocking on the wrong door that she ended up in a room where a French director called Just Jaeckin was testing actresses for a film.
By the time he asked her to slip her dress off, she knew she wasn’t being asked to advertise soap powder – and nothing about it was whiter-than-white.
The film turned out to be the steamy Seventies hit Emmanuelle, and now there is a new ‘feminist’ remake, which hopes to emulate the original’s success – but with a much more MeToo-savvy audience.
Kristel, a former Miss TV Netherlands, played the eponymous tease in the first outing of the erotic drama. In the film, she is urged by her libertine husband to explore all the possibilities of sex (with women as well as men, old as well as young, strangers as well as friends).
Had a little-known Dutch actress called Sylvia Kristel (pictured) not gone to audition for a soap powder commercial, her name would not have become synonymous with sex
Ian McShane with his ex-partner Sylvia Kristel pictured in February 1978
A DVD cover for the original Just Jaeckin film Emmanuelle, released in June 1974
Kristel in 1976. Emmanuelle was seen by 350 million, despite being censored in Spain by Franco and edited for a UK video release in 1990
It was released in June 1974 but ‘unsheathed’ might be a better word, for it caused a sensation and became the year’s top French box office hit. At one cinema on the Champs-
Elysees in Paris it would play continuously for the next 12 years and when its run ended in 1986, Kristel attended the final screening.
Around the world, Emmanuelle was seen by 350 million. In Spain, where it was banned by Franco, they chartered flights to France to see it. Degrees of censorship varied. A scene in a bar where a Thai stripper smokes a cigarette from her vagina was cut from the UK video release in 1990 but restored for the 2007 DVD.
Given its global success, it was no wonder the film ignited a series of sequels, follow-ups, imitations and parodies. Kristel starred in several more of them, up to Emmanuelle 4 (1984), by which time it was decided that (at 32) she was getting a bit too long in the tooth.
A ludicrous narrative was duly constructed whereby she travelled to Brazil for cosmetic surgery, which was so extensive she emerged from it played by a different actress altogether, the much younger Mia Nygren.
By then, Kristel had at least swerved 1978’s Carry On Emmannuelle (the spelling was changed to avoid copyright problems), which featured Kenneth Williams as French ambassador Emile Prevert and Joan Sims as his housekeeper Mrs Dangle. The title role went to Suzanne Danielle.
But it is Kristel who will forever be synonymous with Emmanuelle, notwithstanding the 2024 remake.
Telling a ‘revised tale of Emmanuelle’s sexual awakening, with a feminist twist’, this version, also titled Emmanuelle – with French actress Noemie Merlant in the iconic role – recently had its world premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain.
Early reviews, however, have been lukewarm.
The film mirrors the 50-year-old original by taking its heroine on an ‘erotic’ voyage of discovery to the Far East. As before, she has sex with a stranger on a plane. Even if first-class air travel is not what it was in 1974, the mile-high club still operates.
But whoever had the idea of remaking Emmanuelle today, it was not a good one. Yes, this film writhes and moans, but only with MeToo sensibilities. There is no domineering husband this time round. Pleasuring men, and the occasional woman, is not the be-all and end-all for Merlant’s Emmanuelle as it was for Kristel’s.
Sylvia Kristel with her son Arthur in Amsterdam in February 1975. The Dutch actress will forever be associated with Emmanuelle notwithstanding the 2024 remake
Kristel with her husband, director Philippe Blot in the Shadow of the Sandcastle
Kristel in the Seychelles on the set of Good Bye Emmanuelle in April 1977
Kristel with McShane at the 36th Golden Globe awards at Beverly Hilton Hotel in California
No longer is she a bored, randy housewife. Instead, she’s a sharp-suited hotel chain executive sent to Hong Kong to sack an icy manager played by Naomi Watts. And though she gets pally with a hooker, as in the original, this time the young woman is only a sex worker during breaks from studying for her English Literature degree.
One reviewer has described the film as ‘one big anti-climax’. Anti-climax or not, Kristel is no longer around to see it. She died of cancer in 2012, aged 60, after a life in which briefly dazzling fame was eclipsed by failure and tragedy.
In a piercingly candid 2007 autobiography she wrote that while she had gone on to act in many other films (including a ropey 1981 version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in which she convinced nobody as an English aristocrat), she could never shrug off her most enduring character: ‘I was dressed, but people preferred me naked. I spoke, but they liked me better silent or dubbed.’
Perhaps her tragic existence was mapped from the start. She was born in 1952 in Utrecht and grew up in a hotel run by her parents (both alcoholics). She and her sister shared room 22, except when it was needed for paying guests. Then, sometimes after they had gone to bed, they would be hurried to room 23, a glorified cupboard.
‘I used to wonder, ‘What if my parents needed room 23?’,’ she wrote. ‘Where would we go then?’
Her autobiography begins, laceratingly, with a sex assault by the hotel manager, who she knew as Uncle Hans, when she was nine.
Before it could get worse, her aunt walked in. Hans was fired and Sylvia watched him leave. But as the door slammed she felt ‘a tinge of regret’, reflecting that maybe his punishment was ‘too harsh, more than I am worth?’
That nagging lack of self-esteem, which stayed with her for life, was compounded at 14 when her father, who had left to live with another woman, returned to the hotel with his new mistress and evicted his wife and two daughters.
She left school at 16 and worked as a typist but her pretty face and willowy figure soon attracted modelling agencies, igniting acting ambitions. But the money offered for Emmanuelle was a pittance, less than £5,000.
At first she turned it down but was persuaded to take the role by boyfriend Hugo Claus, a Nobel Prize-nominated Belgian novelist 23 years her senior.
The movie was to be shot in Thailand and Claus – who fancied a free trip – assured Kristel the film would never come out in Holland anyway, so her mother need not know and would not be shamed.
Contrary to those assurances, Emmanuelle ended up having a seismic impact even on the film industry, as producers realised there was mainstream commercial potential in softcore porn.
Kristel was devastatingly impacted by Emmanuelle, having been tainted by the assumption that she and her character were one of the same
It didn’t surprise anyone who knew Kristel when she died alone in a small apartment in Amsterdam
Kristel at her wedding to director Philippe Blot in Paris in June 1986
But its most devastating impact was on Kristel, forever tainted by the assumption – which she considered to be sexist – that she and Emmanuelle were one and the same. Nobody assumed John Wayne went round on horseback shooting people, she once said, ‘yet they think I’m a nymphomaniac’.
She wasn’t, but she led what appeared a racy life.
Her lovers, after Emmanuelle made her a star, included priapic Warren Beatty and French director Roger Vadim.
But it was British actor Ian McShane for whom she left Claus (who had fathered her only child, Arthur). She moved with McShane to California. ‘I thought Hollywood was waiting for me,’ she said. ‘It was not.’
They had a toxic five-year relationship in which she became hooked on cocaine and alcohol, and miscarried after falling down stairs. Her son Arthur was sent back to Utrecht to live with Kristel’s mother. ‘I don’t remember having been sad,’ she recalled. ‘In fact, I was relieved my son was escaping from that life – my life, my fog.’
She married twice after she and McShane split. Her first marriage, to a millionaire US businessman, lasted five months. The second, to a Belgian film producer, lasted long enough for him to clean her out of the money she had made from the Emmanuelle sequels.
She lost homes she had owned in Los Angeles, Paris, Holland and the South of France and was declared bankrupt.
Despite all this misery, Kristel, in the view of her friends, retained a wry wit. She was bright, perceptive, eloquent and spoke four languages fluently, indeed she was upset that Emmanuelle was dubbed so badly into English because she spoke it perfectly.
Yet it didn’t surprise anyone who knew her when she died alone in a small apartment in Amsterdam.
A heavy smoker from the age of 11 – 11! – she was diagnosed with throat cancer, then lung cancer.
As the new version of Emmanuelle opens in France, and limps towards a UK release date, it seems worth remembering the original was more than a fortuitously timed exercise in soft porn.
As Barry Forshaw writes in his authoritative book Sex And Film, Kristel conveys in Emmanuelle ‘a rather winning mixture of naivety and subtle sexual allure; as a woman utterly at ease with her body, she convinces throughout’.
If only she had been at ease with everything else, she would surely have had a much happier life.
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