Violence, betrayal, forgetting: what broke Sylvia Kristel – the legendary Emmanuelle

Sylvia’s parents owned a hotel in Utrecht. The future actress spent her childhood there. The row of faces of the guests who replaced each other is Christelle’s most important memory. The young girl seemed to feel out of place among all these people. She and her sister lived in Room 22. But when a guest appeared willing to pay for their stay, the mother moved her daughters to the adjacent Room 23 – a small room that could barely fit a bed and a wardrobe, and nothing else. They could wake the girls in the middle of the night or early in the morning – and they, asleep, in their nightgowns, trudged along the corridor.

The fact that she was essentially less important than a paying guest in her own home had an impact on the girl. This feeling of wounded dignity will accompany Christelle all her life.

In 2007, in her autobiography, the actress also recounted that at the age of nine she had been the victim of an attempted rape by a hotel manager. The girl was saved by her aunt, who accidentally entered the room. The manager was fired. Looking one last time at the door slamming behind him, Christelle thought for a second: “Isn’t the punishment too severe? Is it worth it? This feeling of uncertainty would haunt her later.

At the age of 14, the fragile sense of belonging completely collapsed. The father brought another woman and kicked out the first family.

“It happened almost 40 years ago, but for me there is nothing sadder than my parents’ divorce.”Sylvia later recalled.

Instead of warm memories, she took away monstrous bad habits from her childhood. Both his parents drank. For example, Sylvia learned to count from the number of glasses of beer her father drank per day. Before school, she learned to count to forty. And for Christelle, alcohol was not something forbidden.

The girl studied at a monastery boarding school, where she once asked the nuns for brandy to help her fall asleep. She was 11 years old. Then she started smoking unfiltered cigarettes – a habit that would later have fatal consequences.

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At the age of 16, Christelle left school, worked as a typist, then began a career as a model. At the age of 21, she starred in three Dutch films and attracted the attention of French director Juste Jacquin, who was about to begin work on an adaptation of Emmanuelle Arsan’s erotic novel Emmanuelle. Soon, Sylvia was given a role that would define her life.

At this time, she had the most important relationship of her life with the Belgian writer Hugo Claus. The man was twenty years older than her, from whom Christel gave birth to her only son, Arthur, in 1975.

It was Klaus who convinced Kristel to act in erotic films – the actress herself initially had doubts.

Emmanuelle became the highest-grossing French film in history and was shown continuously in a cinema on the Champs-Élysées for 13 years. The final show in 1986 was attended by Christelle herself and even the mayor of Paris at the time, Jacques Chirac.

Fame turned out to be an unfaithful friend. Christel was only 32 when producers decided the actress was already old and unsuitable for the role. They were just starting filming the fourth part, where Emmanuelle was played by a new young actress, and Christelle, thanks to a plot trick, was removed from the story.

The paradox is that Christelle, expelled, still proves inseparable from her famous image on the screen.

Sylvia saw no prospects, her career was at a standstill – she decided to move to Hollywood.

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Christelle broke up with Klaus, after losing her mind following a whirlwind romance with British actor Ian McShane, whom she met on the set of the film “The Fifth Musketeer” (1979). Together they went to Los Angeles. They shared a toxic five-year relationship that led to Sylvia’s miscarriage and their addiction to alcohol and drugs.

Christelle gave herself hope, and it vanished again. His Hollywood career didn’t work out either.

Sylvia, of course, performed, but it didn’t earn her the expected star status. But new dramas began in my personal life. Two marriages followed: the first, five tumultuous months, with the American businessman Alan Turner, the second with the Belgian producer Philippe Blau, whose disastrous projects exhausted his finances to the point that bailiffs showed up at his door. She then lived for ten years with Belgian radio producer Fred De Vries, until his death in 2004.

Christelle spent her last years living in an Amsterdam bar and making a living selling the pictures she began painting. The disease was slowly killing her – she was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and metastases were also discovered in the liver.

Sylvia died of a stroke suffered after another chemotherapy treatment.

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