page_title: Sylvia Kristel
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Sylvia Kristel / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Sylvia Kristel au festival de Cannes
context_page_description: Sylvia Maria Kristel was a Dutch model and actress who appeared in over 50 films. She is best remembered as the eponymous character in five of the seven Emmanuelle films.
context_section_description: In September 2006, Kristel's autobiography Nue (Nude) was published in France. The writing was translated into English as Undressing Emmanuelle: A Memoir, by Fourth Estate, 2 July 2007, in which she described a turbulent personal life that was blighted by addictions to drugs and alcohol, and her quest for a father figure, which resulted in some destructive relationships with older men. The book received some positive reviews.
  She had her first major relationship with Belgian author Hugo Claus, who was more than two decades her senior. Their union produced her only child, a son named Arthur, who was born in 1975. She left her husband for British actor Ian McShane, whom she had met on the set of the film The Fifth Musketeer (1979). They moved in together in Los Angeles, where he had promised to help her launch her American career. However, their five-year affair led to no significant career break for Kristel, but a relationship she describes in her autobiography as "awful –  he was witty and charming, but we were too much alike." She began using cocaine about two years into their relationship. This proved her downfall, although at the time she thought of it as a "supervitamin, a very fashionable substance, without danger, but expensive, far more exciting than drowning in alcohol –  a fuel necessary to stay in the swing." Sylvia Kristel also had a relationship with French singer Michel Polnareff.
  Kristel was interviewed in 2006 for the documentary Hunting Emmanuelle. She described how she made a number of poor decisions due to an expensive cocaine addiction. One of those mistakes included selling her interest in Private Lessons to her agent for US$150,000; the film grossed more than US$26 million domestically. After McShane, she married twice, first to Alan Turner, an American businessman. That marriage ended after five months, and she later married film producer Philippe Blot. She spent a decade with Belgian radio producer Fred De Vree, until his death.
  Her authorized biography was written by Dutch journalist Suzanne Rethans and was published in September 2019. It took Rethans more than three years to write it. Titled 'Begeerd en Verguisd'-
  Atlas Contact-ISBN 9789045033174 ('Desired and Vilified'), it has not yet been translated in the English language.
caption: Sylvia Kristel at the Cannes Film Festival, 1990
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