In 2006, in his autobiography ‘Nue (nude)’, Sylvia Kristel said she was anaorgasmic. Her own definition – bigger than a room – with which she dismantled a universe of exogenous sensuality and sexuality drawn from the eyes of others. To Sylvia Kristel, eternal ‘Emmanuelle’, her character gave her a year of glory and a curse that accompanied her until her death, in 2012, when she was barely 60 years old and had many experiences behind her.
On the 50th anniversary of the film that elevated her and for which several generations of Spaniards went to the border to see what the censorship stole from them here, remembering Sylvia Kristel is remembering her tragedy. When she died of a stroke after battling two cancers, the obituaries remembered the Dutchwoman for her eroticism and for everything that came after that role: sexual abuse, a stormy divorce, global fame, drugs and alcohol, oblivion and illness and, finally, premature death.
In his obituary on ABC, the teacher Jose Manuel Cuellar She told it like this: «It was all satin, with a certain cadence that made it enter the realm of elegance. Nevertheless, It was a silk doll that life tore without mercy. Behind that angelic beauty hid a journey traced by demons: she was abused when she was little, she found a destroyed family scenario and spent half her life searching for a father figure she never had and the other half, struggling with drugs. and alcohol.
Of course, Sylvia Kristel as a broken toy of fame and abuse is not unique. In Spain we have similar conditions from that time to Nadiuska, who was actually called Roswithka Bertasha Smid Honczar before the camera began to turn her into an erotic myth. Like Sylvia Maria Kristel, she was first a model (Miss TV Europe 73) before becoming an actress, a profession in which she landed with ‘Frank and Eva’ in 1973, a year before filming ‘Emmanuelle’.
The film had an impact not only in Spain, as some believe. In the rest of the world, without censorship neither Francoism nor Perpignan, also There were lines in front of the cinemas to see Sylvia Kristel and her sensuality. In Paris, the chronicles of the time say, ‘Emmanuelle’ was shown for 13 consecutive years in a cinema on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. ‘Emmanuelle’, also contrary to what the legend left later, was a film with more decency than most of all that ‘uncovering’ of bodies without clothes or justification that during the Transition became a Spanish brand.
After ‘Emmanuelle’ came Kristel’s exploitation. It was not only physical, but also commercial. Sequels arrived with less meaning than dignity: ‘Emmanuelle 2’, in 1975; ‘Goodbye, Emmanuelle’, in 1977, and ‘Emmanuelle 4’, in 1984. The agents and producers of the time paid her little and poorly, and the little that Sylvia Kristel got in the form of percentages of profits from the film she ended up “giving up” to finance drugs. “The problem is that she did not have sentimental handles to withstand the storm of popularity that came her way, and she did have a base of clay that collapsed quickly,” Cuéllar wrote. Serious cinema never took her seriously, because hiring Kristel was hiring the one from ‘Emmanuelle’, and that eclipses any other star on the poster.
Sylvia started smoking at the age of 11 and recently had everything: throat cancer and then lung cancer, until a stroke took her away forever while she was sleeping. The hidden side of her fame and a tragic life since childhood, where she already suffered abuse, brought her a darkness more lasting than the fleeting glow of the red carpets.
