It ran for 12 years in Paris and was banned by Franco in Spain. Now, as the 1970s soft-porn hit is remade for the #MeToo era… How the original Emmanuelle’s love affair with Lovejoy sparked her spiral towards a lonely death in an Amsterdam flat
DAILY MAIL
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).
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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.
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