As ‘Lovelace’ hits the big screen this summer,
this is the candid and heartbreaking story of 70s legend
Sylvia Kristel, star of the ‘Emmanuelle’ erotic
classics.
1974: After a year of wrangling with
the censors, the erotic film, Emmanuelle, is a
blockbuster sensation on release in France and a box
office triumph around the world from Japan to the
States. The image that adorned cinemas across the world
was of an unknown 20 year old posing naked, innocent and
vulnerable on a wicker chair. Overnight Sylvia Kristel
was propelled into international superstardom (at the
height of her fame she was invited to address the
Brazilian parliament) and turned into an icon of sexual
liberation.
Sylvia Kristel was born of a
dysfunctional family and an impossibly strict religious
education. But having won the Miss TV Europe competition
in 1973 she was driven by her own ambition to be an
actress on the world stage and auditioned for the part
of the innocent seductress in Emmanuelle. Through the
phenomenal success of the three Emmanuelle films she
starred in, she became the darling of Hollywood, as she
seduced and was seduced by the rich and the beautiful of
the golden age of cinema. But she found herself typecast
as Emmanuelle and often played roles that capitalized
upon that image, most notably starring in an adaptation
of ‘Lady Chatterly's Lover’, and a nudity-filled biopic
of World War I spy, Mata Hari, in which she played the
title role. Almost inevitably she became the victim of
her own innocence as it was Emmanuelle people wanted,
not Sylvia. The price that she paid for her meteoric
rise was an equally rapid descent into an excess of
alcohol and drugs as her tempestuous family life
threatened to fall apart all together.
Naked,
candid and heart-breakingly honest, ‘Undressing
Emmanuelle’ tells the story of one of Europe's most
celebrated cinema icons and the price she paid for her
beauty and innocence.
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