IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING about Sylvia Kristel, you know what she looks like naked. And Naked was the title of her book when it was published in France last year. There, it ignited as much excitement as her cinema appearances did.

The film that made her famous, Emmanuelle, has long since become shorthand for highbrow soft-porn fantasy, all sapphic fumbling and smoking diplomats. Watching it now is faintly embarrassing – you’ll see more explicit action in a Pussycat Dolls video. But in its time it was groundbreaking: tourists descended on Paris from as far away as Japan to see the film. And something like 15 gazillion people have seen it on video. Emmanuelle and Sylvia Kristel are as much a part of the French cultural DNA as Michelin stars and foie gras.

But Sylvia was not French. Born in Utrecht, she sought fame to dull the pain of a difficult childhood, framed by an unhappy relationship with her parents. In chapters so short that they are almost haiku, she describes an upbringing of boredom and neglect. It drove her to escape first through boarding school and then through acting.

But work became its own trap as she was typecast after Emmanuelle. The prudishly raised Dutch girl could not escape the screen image of aloof libertine. So she sought freedom in disastrous relationships, drinking and drugs.

Far from being seedy, however, this is an elegantly written book. The prose is simple, evocative, and highly readable. I found myself wishing that our homegrown celebrities would write books full of ideas and feelings, not glossy-magazine therapy-speak. A few of her highly stylised sentences tell far more about the whys and wherefores of exposure and fame than all the trash clogging the bestseller lists of late.

The list of Kristel’s former lovers reads like a who’s who of the 1970s and 1980s: Roger Vadim, Gerard Dépardieu, Ian McShane, Warren Beatty. She sought love avidly and was often lonely. Like the carefully managed Netherlands forever fighting off the sea, she was more at the mercy of her destiny than in control of it. She lost her savings while entangled with a roué photographer and made Emmanuelle 6, then Emmanuelle 7. Her later films she dismisses as “rough, unseen, done for money”. They are not what she hoped as a career, but she was ambivalent about her fate from the beginning: “I’d like to do nothing. Wait for life to paint itself. But that’s not possible . . .”

McShane once said of Kristel that she couldn’t walk and talk at the same time. And she doesn’t deny that she is no Meryl Streep. That’s what makes this so enjoyable. She doesn’t exactly regrette rien, but is acutely aware of her place in the cinematic world, and has a sense of humour about it. Her experience of the “super vitamin” of the 1970s, cocaine, gets the lightest of touches: “Everyone takes it, including my doctor and lawyer. It was everywhere in those days.” One can only hope that some of today’s more unhinged starlets of today eventually get to the same place.

Kristel eventually finds love, although not the key to her own sexuality. Throat cancer is diagnosed and she begins a career as a painter. There is, as generations of teenagers perhaps suspected, far more to Emmanuelle than she dared to show us.

As a young woman, she bared herself physically; now, it is the emotional Sylvia who appeals for our attention. And there is no denying that she is very attractive this way.

Last week I flew out of Schipol airport, and was transfixed by the Dutch landscape: the geometric coastline, the dredged islands, woods planted in rows and endless blocks of flats, each identical. You could go mad in a country like that, I thought. You would want, like the water, to flow free. That is what Kristel has attempted to do, and she almost succeeds. Why almost? Because this is her testimonial, not her epitaph. The woman who played Emmanuelle, like my mother, is only 55.

UNDRESSING EMMANUELLE by Sylvia Kristel

Fourth Estate, £14.99; 304pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £13.49 (free p&p)

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