Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol

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Sylvia Maria Kristel (28 September 1952– 17 October 2012) [4] was a Dutch actress and model who appeared in over 50 films. She is best remembered as the eponymous character in five of the seven Emmanuelle films, including originating the role with Emmanuelle (1974). [5] [6] Early life [ edit ] Speaking of Huppert, probably the great role that I would have most liked to have seen Sylvia in was in Pialat’s masterful LouLou. It would have given Sylvia another opportunity to work again with the great Gerard Depardieu (who she had held her own with in the marvelous Rene the Cane) and I think would have completely reshaped her career for the eighties. Kristel was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands; she was the elder daughter of an innkeeper, Jean-Nicholas Kristel, and his wife Pietje Hendrika Lamme. [7] In her 2006 autobiography, Nue, she stated that she was sexually abused by an elderly hotel guest when she was nine years old, an experience she otherwise refused to discuss. Her parents divorced when she was 14 years old, after her father abandoned the family for another woman. "It was the saddest thing that ever happened to me," she said of the experience of her parents' separation. [8] Career [ edit ] Kristel in 1973 Richey makes no bones of the fact that 1974’s Julia( Es war nicht die nachigall) made a point of riding the pronounced coattails of Emmanuelle.This despite the reality that this somewhat jumbled entry in the “Bavarian Sex Cycle” of the time was actually filmed before the latter phenomenon.It’s tempting to claim that that accounts for Kristel’s limited screen time, as the actress had yet to explode in popularity at the time of Julia’s production.A more certain claim would be the obviousness in naming the movie after Kristel’s character- her first name only, at that.Her character Julia, however brief her cumulative presence, isa vital and unforgettable part of director Sigi Rothemund’s eighty-eight minute sexually charged coming-of-age vacation film.

My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.” — Katherine Dunn As much as I regret that she passed on opportunities to work with directors like Ingmar Bergman and Maurice Pialat, which I detail towards the end of the book, I want the proper focus to be on the great work she did. Like Elvis, her story is part tragic but mostly triumph. It’s a bummer that works like Une Femme Fidele, La Marge and Alice have yet to get their due, but they will. Great art survives and Sylvia made a lot of it, throughout a number of fields.Sheila O’Malley: Your passions and obsessions run deep and wide. It’s one of the reasons why you are such a compelling writer, and why I was so drawn to your blog, Moon in the Gutter, the moment I discovered it. Having read you all these years, I am familiar with your tastes – the people who matter to you artistically – so I am very curious about your desire to choose Sylvia Kristel as the subject of your first book. What started you on this journey? When did it segue from blog-posts to book idea?

So, while I think it’s okay to look at missed roles in everything from King Kong to Body Heat to Once Upon a Time in America as regrettable, ultimately the great films she made make up for those. Ironically, Sylvia’s dismissal of several plum parts helped give rise to both Adjani and Isabelle Huppert. As Maria Theresa, Kristel led a cast that included Ursula Andress, Cornel Wilde, Beau Bridges, Rex Harrison and Olivia de Havilland in The Fifth Musketeer (1979). During the shooting, Kristel and Ian McShane, who played the wily minister Fouquet, began a highly publicised, five-year-long affair. Las orgías inconfesables de Emmanuelle ( The Inconfessable Orgies of Emmanuelle) (1982), directed by Jesus Franco.

The sexual explicitness in Emmanuelle films varies from arty softcore to full hardcore, although no penetration or oral sex made it to public versions. Many question the place of hardcore scenes in Emmanuelle and ASP never attempted to mix the two genres after experimenting in the late 1980s. CINE REVUE TELE-PROGRAMMES - 60e Année N° 9 du 28/02/1980 - Les drogues qui tuent / Pourquoi ces bides au cinéma / Philippe Noiret / Sylvia Kristel / Tom Horn avec Steve Mc Queen The character of Emmanuelle is also featured in a video game of the same name, released by Coktel Vision in 1989. Kristel was a heavy cigarette smoker from the age of 11. She was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2001, and underwent three courses of chemotherapy and surgery after the disease spread to her lungs. [18] On 12 June 2012, she suffered a stroke and was hospitalized in critical condition. [19] Four months later, she died in her sleep at age 60 from esophageal and lung cancer. [20] Kristel is buried at her place of birth in Utrecht, the Netherlands. [3] Filmography [ edit ] Film [ edit ] Year

JR: While I hate gossip in general, I’m honestly not sure why I have never had much interest in the type of salacious-driven biographies that so many seem to gravitate towards. I recall as a child being so disturbed by Albert Goldman’s criminal book on Elvis that it still angers me to this day. I was so turned off by the invasiveness of that book and honestly so many other similar hatchet jobs that I read growing up. I don’t care about people’s sex-lives or relationships in general unless they had an obvious impact on the artist’s work, like the relationship Sylvia had with the brilliant writer Hugo Claus. I will probably go to my grave not appreciating how who slept with who offers any understanding to an artist’s life and that applies to anyone I am interested in. She was cast to play the part of Stella in Roman Polanski's film The Tenant (1976) but, after one day of shooting, she was replaced by Isabelle Adjani. In 1977, she was invited to star as Hattie in Louis Malle's controversial erotic drama Pretty Baby (1978) but the role eventually went to Susan Sarandon instead. Several years later, the director wanted to cast Kristel as Ingrid in his next film Damage (1992), but the actress was unavailable at the time. She was friends with Sergio Leone who wanted her to play the role of Carol in the movie Once Upon a Time in America (1984); the producers did not agree to her participation and the role went to Tuesday Weld. In 1982, she was turned down by Tony Scott for the role of Miriam in The Hunger (1983); Catherine Deneuve ended up playing the part. She was considered for the role of Lois Lane in Superman (1978), which went to Margot Kidder. Sylvia unsuccessfully applied for the role of a Bond Girl in the movies: The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981) and Octopussy (1983).Richey has now written his first book, Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol, published this week by Cult Epics. It is a generous (and beautifully designed) book, filled with reproduced posters, lobby cards, publicity photos, showing this young untrained (and yet instinctive and extremely well-read) actress thrust into the international European spotlight for her featured roles in the emerging Dutch cinema of the 1970s. She made a splash almost instantly, with her small role in Frank and Eva. Other roles followed, and more and more directors took an interest. Her fame was no longer just local, it began to spread. When Kristel died in 2012, the obituaries led with Emmanuelle in the headlines. Richey’s book delves into why that is simplistic at best, unfair at worst. He makes the case, painstakingly, meticulously, that her work was unique, that she wasn’t a, say, B-movie Brigitte Bardot. Francois Truffaut was a fan, as was Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. People jostled to work with her. She turned down some very famous roles, roles that may have been game-changers in terms of perception of her, particularly in America where many of her films remained (to this day) un-seeable.

Jeremy Richey is a living example of “focus on what you love, not what you hate.” You can still be critical, don’t misunderstand, but you’re coming from a place of curiosity and enthusiasm. It’s infectious. La Marge (1976) ( The Streetwalker, also released as Emmanuelle 77), directed by Walerian Borowczyk. JR: Seeing Sylvia in Walerian Borowczyk’s La Marge in the mid-nineties was the real turning point. I was so blown away and moved by both the film and her performance. Both had a major impact on me like no other and the genesis for the book really came from that moment, which was years before I started writing online. Also, some of it was anger as well as I felt, and feel, that a truly remarkable figure in film history had been all but ignored or written out of it. I wanted to help correct that. Le ragazze dello swing. Trio Lescano. 2 DVDs. Con Andrea Osvart, Lotte Verbeek, Elise Schaap, Giuseppe Battiston, Hary Prinz, Sylvia Kristel Well, I'm tall, skinny, look fairly androgynous with no tits to speak of. But I did look confident nude and I think that's what attracted people. If I'd had pouty lips and big boobs like Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield I think my life would have been as short as theirs. You can't hang on to those type of looks.

JR: Pialat was very vocal at the time about how disappointed he was and even had Huppert and Depardieu watching Sylvia onscreen in the film, so in a way he got her in his film anyway. Funnily enough, he had also put her image in his earlier Passe ton bac d’abord. Pialat was just one of a number of truly masterful filmmakers inspired by Sylvia, who sadly never got to work with her. Polanski was another, and of course Bergman. I look upon these missed opportunities as just adding to the richness of her story, although looking at the films she could have made in the eighties if she hadn’t mistakenly come to America and became saddled with such outfits as Cannon does leave a lump in my throat. Her favourite film was Borowczyk's The Streetwalker (La Marge, 1976), in which she is touching as a mysterious and proud prostitute who has an affair with a happily married man (Joe Dallesandro). Alice or the Last Escapade (Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, 1977) was a surprising departure into fantasy for Chabrol. In this homage to Lewis Carroll and "old dark house" movies, Kristel does her best with the passive character. a b "Actress Sylvia Kristel buried in Netherlands". Agence France-Presse via Yahoo! News. 26 October 2012. Archived from the original on 18 April 2020 . Retrieved 18 April 2020. When released in 1974, the erotic French film Emmanuellebecame a worldwide sensation that topped box offices and garnered controversy. The movie would catapult its starlet, Sylvia Kristel, into the limelight, but at the same time it would overshadow her. Kristel became synonymous with the Emmanuelle character whose specter she could never escape despite efforts appearing in a variety of other films ranging from auteur-made art house movies to lifeless commercial fare. During her lifetime, few critics and scholars took Kristel seriously as an actress. Jeremy Richey’s book, Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol( SK:FETC) aims to rectify this oversight and help usher in a reassessment and a rediscovery of Kristel and her body of work. Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol is a film-by-film guide to one of the most distinctive and uncompromising careers in modern cinema, and a celebration of a most remarkable woman in a fully illustrated coffee-table book written by author Jeremy Richey.