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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
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.
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. In a piercingly candid 2007 autobiography she wrote that while she had gone on to act in many other films (including a ropey 1981 version of Lady Chatterley's Lover in which she convinced nobody as an English aristocrat), she could never shrug off her most enduring character: 'I was dressed, but people preferred me naked. As Barry Forshaw writes in his authoritative book Sex And Film, Kristel conveys in Emmanuelle 'a rather winning mixture of naivety and subtle sexual allure; as a woman utterly at ease with her body, she convinces throughout'.
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