GOLDEN OF SEX!
After the tragic death of
THE world lost a legend last week
when Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel passed away.
Dutch actress Sylvia – who starred in five of the softcore adult films between 1974 and 1993 and six TV spin-offs – died in an Amsterdam hospital, aged 60, after a ten-year battle with cancer.
The iconic, French-made erotic movies are famed for bringing soft porn to mainstream cinema.
And sexy Sylvia is credited with helping spark a whole new era of uninhibited pleasure, when X-rated flicks weren’t relegated to the top shelf but projected on the big screen.
As we celebrate the ground-breaking contribution Sylvia made to movie industry, we also toast some of the other babes who helped make the 70s the Golden Age of Sex.
FORGET
Mamma Mia – in the 70s you could take your missus to the flicks to watch a XXX film!
It was a magical time that saw couples flocking to the pictures to watch smoking hot actresses like Marilyn Chambers, Linda Lovelace, Bambi Woods and Mary Millington romping on-screen.
Sylvia Kristel became a global star after starring in the Emmanuelle films, about a horny and frustrated housewife of a French diplomat.
The original 1974 movie was purely softcore, meaning it was restricted to erotic scenes, where the camera cut away just before the crucial moment of penetration.
Describing how she won the audition for the role Sylvia said: “He (the producer, Yves Rousset-Rouard) asked me to take my dress off – luckily it was an easy dress to take off.
“It had spaghetti straps which I slipped over my shoulders and it just fell off.
“I carried on talking and smoking in the nude. I was not inhibited at all. I’d done nude modelling and he thought I was very graceful.”
But there were plenty of other XXX-rated skinflicks on offer in those days, too.
For the first time, movie-goers had easy access to images that included deep throat action and mass orgies shown on the big screen at their local picture house.
It made overnight stars of the actresses and allowed adult moviemakers access to the sort of money usually only afforded to mainstream releases featuring household names.
THE
boom began in 1972 when blonde babe Marilyn Chambers went to audition as an erotic dancer for amateur porn-makers Jim and Artie Mitchell in San Francisco.
The brothers liked Marilyn’s freshfaced innocence and her resemblance to pretty Taxi Driver star Cybill Shepherd so much that they cast her as the lead in what was to become one of the most successful movies of all time – Behind The Green Door.
The XXX film, which had an unprecedented budget of £30,000 and a proper screenwriter, became a box-office sensation, grossing £35m to date.
It opens with Marilyn being taken to a sex theatre where she performs a variety of sexual acts with multiple partners in front of a masked audience.
The gorgeous actress, who died in 2009, received the highest sum ever paid to a porn star – £15,000 plus one per cent of earnings – for the steamy flick.