Actress Sylvia Kristel has died, aged 60. She had been ill for some time, suffering with cancer and having suffered a stroke in the summer.

Kristel was best known for starring in Emmanuelle in 1974, although her career began a year earlier with a handful of Dutch films including Because of the Cats. However, it was the ground-breaking soft core erotic Emmanuelle that made her a star, as the film became a global phenomenon, playing the Champs Elysee for a decade and raking in a fortune (while often being heavily censored in countries like the UK). She would appear in two more films in the series during the 1970s – Emmanuelle 2 and Goodbye Emmanuelle - and then make supporting roles in several of the 1980s and 1990s sequels, leaving the erotic action to younger actresses – in Emmanuelle IV, shot in 3D, she undergoes plastic surgery to re-emerge as Mia Nygren, while Emmanuelle 7 and the connected TV film series from 1993 (also starring George Lazenby!) saw a combination of flashbacks and advice from Emmanuelle.

The success of the film led to more erotic and dramatic roles in European films, often for heavyweight directors – Julia, Borowczyk’s The Streetwalker, Claude Chabrol’s Alice ou la Derniere fugue, Robbe-Grillet’s Playing with Fire, Roger Vadim’s Une Femme Fidele, Mysteries - and comedies – Rene the Cane, Love in First Class, The Lady on the Bed.

Her experience with American films was less happy, the typical hypocrisy towards anyone involved in ‘porn’ playing its part to reduce her to some less than great movies – The Concorde: Airport 79, The Nude Bomb, Private Lessons, The Big Bet and Dracula’s Widow amongst them. Her best work of the 1980s included Emmanuelle director Just Jaekin’s glossy version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the vigorous women in prison movie Red Heat.

In the 1990s, she returned to Holland where she would occasionally act as well as paint. Her autobiography, Undressing Emmanuelle, appeared in 2006 and detailed her life through the sex, drugs and decadence years of the 1970s and into her less public, more sober existence of the time. It’s a good read.