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).
…