There can be few film actors so closely associated with one role as was Sylvia Kristel, who has died of cancer aged 60. The title role of the sexually adventurous housewife in Emmanuelle (1974) became a reference for every part she played subsequently. This was not surprising, as the Dutch star did play a character called Emmanuelle, with few variations, many times over.
In the original film, Kristel portrayed the bored wife of a French embassy official in Bangkok, urged by her libertine husband to explore all the possibilities of sex. Thereupon, she finds herself in bed with, among others, a lesbian archaeologist and an elderly roué. Directed with some grace by Just Jaeckin, this glossy soft-porn package, dressed up as art-house erotica, was a huge international hit, becoming the first X-rated film to be released in the US. Lushly photographed and with a certain level of character development, its appeal went beyond the raincoat brigade. The success was also put down to Kristel's underestimated performance.
According to the critic Roger Ebert: "She projects a certain vulnerability that makes several of the scenes work. The performers in most skin-flicks seem so impervious to ordinary mortal failings, so blasé in the face of the most outrageous sexual invention, that finally they just become cartoon characters. Kristel actually seems to be present in the film, and as absorbed in its revelations as we are." Her performances in several other films, with directors including Walerian Borowczyk, Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim and Alain Robbe-Grillet, proved that she was worthy of better than most of the quickie tosh in which she appeared.
She was born in Utrecht, Netherlands, where her parents ran a hotel. In her 2006 autobiography, Undressing Emmanuelle, she recalls how she was sexually abused aged nine by an elderly guest at the hotel. Her alcoholic parents divorced when she was 14 after her father left home for another woman. Two years later, he returned with the woman, kicking his wife, Sylvia and her sister out of the house.
After a convent school education, Kristel became a photographic model, with a lack of inhibition that landed her role in Emmanuelle – soon followed by Emmanuelle 2 (1975), in which the scene has shifted to Hong Kong, though this is hardly noticeable, because most of the action is in soft-focus close-ups. Kristel again disrobes elegantly and supplies the endless round of sexual encounters with a modicum of tasteful eroticism.
The last of the trilogy, set in the Seychelles, was mistitled Goodbye Emmanuelle (1977), because Kristel would appear again in two more features and seven TV films as the older Emmanuelle, usually instructing a younger version of herself in the art of seduction. In between, her reputation was being exploited by the eccentric French director Jean-Pierre Mocky, who got her to swim naked in No Pockets in a Shroud (1974), and she played a prostitute in Robbe-Grillet's Playing with Fire (1975). In Vadim's A Faithful Wife (Une Femme Fidèle, 1976), set during the 19th century, Kristel was allowed to keep her beautiful costumes on most of the time.
Her favourite film was Borowczyk's The Streetwalker (La Marge, 1976), in which she is touching as a mysterious and proud prostitute who has an affair with a happily married man (Joe Dallesandro). Alice or the Last Escapade (Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, 1977) was a surprising departure into fantasy for Chabrol. In this homage to Lewis Carroll and "old dark house" movies, Kristel does her best with the passive character.
As Maria Theresa, Kristel led a cast that included Ursula Andress, Cornel Wilde, Beau Bridges, Rex Harrison and Olivia de Havilland in The Fifth Musketeer (1979). During the shooting, Kristel and Ian McShane, who played the wily minister Fouquet, began a highly publicised, five-year-long affair.
It was among the few mainstream movies that Kristel made, another being The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979) in which she is a flight attendant who says to the captain (George Kennedy): "You pilots are such... men," only to receive the reply: "They don't call it the cockpit for nothing, honey."
She was soon back to roles that were expected of her, such as a soft-porn version of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1981), for which she was reunited with Jaeckin. In Private Lessons (1981), an American film set in Arizona, she is a maid who sexually initiates a teenage boy. (She had a stand-in for the sex scenes.) It was a box-office smash, but Kristel got no share in the profits as she had unwisely sold her share in the production prior to its release. A success with the teen crowd was the broad US high-school farce Private School (1983), in which Kristel plays a sex education teacher called Ms Regina Copoletta, an example of the level of its humour.
In 1985 Kristel had the impossible task of competing with Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Jeanne Moreau as Mata Hari, revealing much more than they did. Although she continued to be active, she was by then struggling with drugs and alcohol. A heavy smoker from the age of 11, she was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2001, and then lung cancer.
She survived to work again, directing a short animated film, Topor and Me (2004), which won an award at the Tribeca film festival in 2006. Two years ago, I attended the Pula festival in Croatia where she was invited for the showing of Two Sunny Days, a Croatian film in English, directed by Ognjen Svilicic, in which she appeared in a small but important role. I had the pleasure of sharing a car with her on a two-hour drive to Zagreb, during which she chatted cheerfully about her career.
Kristel was married and divorced twice. She is survived by her partner, Peter Brul, and a son by the Belgian author Hugo Claus, a partner from the mid-1970s.