A long-awaited memoir by Sylvia Kristel, the Dutch model who played the title role, is the talk of Paris on the eve of an annual ritual known as the rentrée littéraire, or the “literary return to work”.

This is the period in September when most books are published in France though Kristel’s account of her rise to stardom — and later descent into drug-addiction — is certain to stand out from the crowd.

It is called Nue (Naked), a fitting title for an actress whose son Arthur asked her when he was 10: “Mummy, can’t you do films where you don’t have to take your pants off?” However well she became known for it, stripping in front of the camera was not something that Kristel, who had a convent education in Utrecht, ever enjoyed. “You might laugh, but that is my truth,” she writes. “I am quite demure.”

She began modelling at 17 and won a Miss TV Europe contest in 1973 that got her an audition for the role in Emmanuelle. It turned out to be one of the most successful French films ever made but for Kristel this was a mixed blessing.

The poster famously showed her relaxing naked in a rattan chair and was plastered over the Champs Elysées for more than a decade after the film’s sensational opening in 1974.

“It was all very agreeable while it lasted,” says Kristel, who now lives in a small flat in Amsterdam, where she spends her time painting. When you are famous, “everyone calls you ‘darling’ and says ‘of course’ to everything you say”.

The fall from iconic status was just as abrupt. Kristel’s drift into alcoholism, drug addiction and unsuccessful minor roles and marriages is related in her book with the ironic detachment of a shipwreck survivor looking back on the ordeal.

She has no illusions about her talent as an actress. “My body was more interesting than my words,” she says, describing more in humour than bitterness her sad discovery, during the filming of Emmanuelle, that the producer did not mind when she forgot the words. “Don’t worry, love,” they told her. “You’ll be dubbed anyway.”

The film, which had originally been banned by censors in France, tells the story of a young woman discovering sensual pleasure in the Far East and was a cultural landmark for a generation. People flocked to Paris to see it.

At the peak of her fame Kristel had it all — her own driver, make-up artist, hairdresser, press spokesman, photographer, personal trainer and secretary. She had been paid only £2,000 for the Emmanuelle role and was then flooded with lucrative offers. But she could not avoid being typecast as the sultry Emmanuelle and most of her subsequent roles capitalised on that image, from an adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to a drama about Mata Hari, the first world war spy.

These all flopped, as did various Emmanuelle sequels, and Kristel moved to Hollywood in the hope of giving her career a boost. Unfortunately, the Emmanuelle image followed her there. She was cast as a maid who seduces a teenage boy in Private Lessons.

A taste for champagne that she had developed before stripping on the set of Emmanuelle turned into a passion for vodka and she became a fixture of drug-fuelled Hollywood parties, where she rubbed shoulders with celebrities such as Warren Beatty, the actor.

He invited her to a meeting in a hotel and she was surprised to find him sitting in the lobby with a young female “assistant”. Apparently he thought Kristel might be a lesbian and had invited the other woman along in case she were needed.

Kristel came to financial ruin after inheriting the debt of a husband wanted for fraud. Pursued by bailiffs, she returned to Holland in 1988. She married a film producer, then a poet.

She was afflicted with lung and then throat cancer but survived. “I’ve bounced back,” she says. “My skin is clear, my eyes are grey green. My nose is impeccable. One might even find me beautiful.”

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