Of all the awful things in that supremely awful decade, the 1970s, the fad for soft-focus “eroticism” is the most excruciating. Porn may be all about us now, and even Deep Throat is revered as a sociologically important comedy, but the memory of 1970s soft-core art-porn, with its artistic pretensions, leaves hardly a toe uncurled. The fad is epitomised by the 1974 French film Emmanuelle, the first sex film to play in mainstream cinemas in Britain.

This is the poignant, semi-intentionally hilarious autobiography of that film’s doomed star, Sylvia Kristel, composed in a breathless present tense. Kristel was the pretty young Dutch-woman who won the Miss TV Europe competition in 1973, which got her an introduction to the magnificently named director Just Jaeckin. He offered her the lead in a film about the sexual awakening and erotic misadventures of an innocent abroad: Emmanuelle.

With what the reader soon learns to recognise as childlike solemnity, Kristel recalls: “No well-known French actress will touch it: they say it’s all pornography, which is already widespread, shown through a network of badly lit specialist cinemas that smell of fresh sperm and stale air. I know that in my hands the role of Emmanuelle will never be reduced to pornography. I know this intuitively.”

Taking us back to her childhood, as the daughter of a hotelier in Utrecht, she remembers being sexually molested by the manager. One night, her haunted mother wakes her up to shout: “‘I hate penetration! Do you understand? . . . I can’t stand your father coming back from hunting or wherever, reeking of alcohol, sweat and blood, slipping into my bed while I sleep and wanting to penetrate me. I don’t want it, I can’t do it. I’m too tight, do you understand?!’ ‘No, I don’t understand, Mummy.’‘You do, you do understand! And anyway, there isn’t just penetration; there are other things you can do.’”

I wonder if Kristel’s vocation for soft-core originates in that terrible moment? Anyway, Emmanuelle leads to other Emmanuelle sequels, and to other fantastically cheesy non-erotica productions, including The Concorde: Airport ’79, opposite a furious Alain Delon.

She goes to Los Angeles, parties, has an unhappy liaison with the actor Ian McShane and, like every female with a pulse, gets it on with Warren Beatty. But she blows her fortune on cocaine and signing debt-guarantee contracts for her manipulative boyfriends. Ultimately, she winds up almost penniless in a one-bedroom Amsterdam apartment, where she pursues her new career of painting.

Her story is gripping, and Kristel herself is often lovably crazy. When she paints, she dresses as a ballerina: “I am always looking around for a cloth to wipe my hands, and can’t stand those multi-coloured drying-up cloths that make me feel as if I’m cooking, so I buy some flounced tulle tutus.” For all the dottiness, however, she has shrewd things to say about the misogyny and cruelty of a business that expected nothing from her but sexiness, and that sneered at her when she was washed up. Now a survivor of booze, drugs and cancer, she gets by with her eccentric sense of humour, and the belief that this book will restore her fortunes. I hope it does.

Undressing Emmanuelle: A Memoir by Sylvia Kristel
Fourth Estate £14.99 pp292
Buy the book here at the offer price of £13.49 (inc p&p)

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