Early life
Kristel was born in Utrecht, Netherlands, the elder daughter of an innkeeper, Jean-Nicholas Kristel, and his wife Piet. 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.
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Personal life
In September 2006, Kristel's autobiography Nue (Nude) was published in France. It was translated into English as Undressing Emmanuelle: A Memoir, by Fourth Estate, 2 July 2007 (ISBN 978-0007256952), in which she told of a turbulent personal life blighted by addictions to drugs, alcohol, and her quest for a father figure, which resulted in some destructive relationships with older men. The book received some positive reviews.[9]
Her first major relationship was with Belgian author Hugo Claus, more than two decades her senior, with whom she had her only child, a son, Arthur (born 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 would lead 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". About two years into the relationship she began using cocaine. 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."
Interviewed in 2006 for the documentary Hunting Emmanuelle, she describes how, nurturing an expensive cocaine habit, she made a number of poor decisions, including selling her interest inPrivate Lessons to her agent for $150,000; the film would gross more than $26 million domestically. Since McShane, she married twice, first to an American businessman which ended after five months, and then to film producer Phillippe Blot. She spent a decade with Belgian radio producer Fred De Vree, until his death.
[edit]Illness and death
A heavy smoker of unfiltered cigarettes from the age of eleven, Kristel was diagnosed withthroat cancer in 2001 and underwent three courses of chemotherapy, and surgery after the disease spread to her lungs. On 12 June 2012, she suffered a stroke and was hospitalized in critical condition.
She died in her sleep, aged 60, from esophageal and lung cancer.[12] She was survived by her son, Arthur Claus, and her younger sister, Marianne.
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