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

Sylvia’s parents owned a hotel in Utrecht. The future actress spent her childhood there. The chain of faces of the guests who took turns is Christelle’s most important memory. The girl seemed to feel out of place among all these people. She and her sister lived in room 22. But when a guest showed up who was prepared to pay for their stay, the mother moved her daughters into neighboring room 23 – a tiny room that 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 would trudge sleepily down the hall in their nightgowns.

The fact that she was essentially less important than a paying guest in her own home took its toll on the girl. This sense of wounded dignity stayed with Christelle for the rest of her life.

In 2007, the actress also stated in her autobiography that she was subjected to an attempted rape by a hotel manager at the age of nine. The girl was saved by her aunt who accidentally entered the room. The manager was fired. As Christelle slammed the door behind him for the last time, she thought for a moment, “Isn’t the punishment too severe? It’s worth it? This feeling of insecurity would haunt her later.

At 14, the fragile sense of home completely collapsed. The father brought in 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 her parents drank. For example, Sylvia learned to count from the number of glasses of beer her father drank in a day. She learned to count to forty before school. And for Christelle, alcohol was not something forbidden.

The girl studied at a convent boarding school, where she once asked the nuns for cognac to help her sleep. She was 11 years old. At the same time, she started smoking cigarettes without a filter – a habit that would later have fatal consequences.

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

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

It was Klaus who convinced Kristelová to act in erotica – the actress herself had doubts at first.

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

Fame proved to be an unfaithful friend. Christelle was only 32 years old when the producers decided that the actress was already old and not suitable for the role. They were just starting to shoot the fourth episode, where Emmanuelle was played by a new young actress and Christelle was taken out of the plot thanks to a script trick.

The paradox was that the expelled Kristel proved to be inseparable from her famous image on the screen anyway.

Sylvia saw no prospects, her career stopped – she decided to move to Hollywood.

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

Christelle gave herself hope again and it disappeared again. She didn’t even have a career in Hollywood.

Of course, Sylvia acted, but it did not bring her the expected star status. But new dramas started in my personal life. Two marriages followed: the first, for five tumultuous months, to American businessman Alan Turner, the second to Belgian producer Philippe Blau, whose dire projects drained her finances to the point where bailiffs showed up at her door. She then lived with Belgian radio producer Fred De Vries for ten years, until his death in 2004.

Christelle spent the last years of her life in an Amsterdam bar, making a living by selling the paintings she began to paint. The disease was slowly killing her – she was diagnosed with larynx cancer, metastases were also found in her liver.

Sylvia died of a stroke she suffered after another round of chemotherapy.

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