Remembering “Emmanuelle”: RIP Sylvia Kristel

Sylvia Kristel, the original "Emmanuelle," passed away in her sleep last night at the age of sixty. The world has lost an erotic icon--not to mention a mother, a lover, and an artist of many media--but her impact will always be felt, and her movies remain some of the greatest pieces of softcore cinema of all time.

We first got to know Kristel when Allie Haze took up the mantle of Emmanuelle in May of 2011. Our little "Emmanuelle" retrospective gave us a look at Kristel's first appearance in the 1974 "Emmanuelle" as well as one of the sequels and a TV movie version made in the '90s in which she had a cameo. Still, the first film sticks out the strongest in our minds because we got to see the titular character's transformation from doting wife into voracious love machine. As with many softcore films from the sexploitation era, the movie emphasized the liberation and personal freedom that could only be attained by separating love from sex. There may be other Emmanuelles who go through that transformation, but Kristel was the first and will forever be our favorite.

As the Associated Press wrote in a story today, Kristel had no idea how big "Emmanuelle" would be: "I was nervous but then my boyfriend said, 'Who's going to watch this film? It will never pass censorship.'" The movie was filmed in Thailand, to which her boyfriend also said, "'Thailand, that's nice, we've never been there and anyway the film will never come out in the Netherlands so you won't put your mother to shame.'" 350 million people all over the world saw it, and nobody knows how many countless others bought, rented, or downloaded it later.

After "Emmanuelle" became a huge success, Kristel ended up typecast as a nymphomaniac--notes the AP story, "'People don't assume John Wayne shoots people and rides a horse on weekends," she told a Dutch interviewer"--and she was put in a bunch of other softcore films. In fact, we were talking about her role in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" just yesterday! One of her biggest Hollywood films was also softcore: it was the once-controversial "Private Lessons," the story of a boy who falls in love with his much older foreign housekeeper. All in all, Kristel has more than fifty international films to her name.

You know what that means? We're going to have a Sylvia Kristel movie marathon. And yes, we're even going to watch the films she directed and received awards for and was not naked in. That's how much we love her.

· Story via Associated Press (bigstory.ap.org)