The cause was cancer, her agency, Features Creative Management said in a statement on its Web site, without saying where she died. AVN, a trade publication for the sex film industry, reported that she died at home in The Hague.
Ms. Kristel was a willowy, dark-haired model and beauty contest winner in her early 20s with scant acting experience when she was cast by the French director Just Jaeckin as Emmanuelle, the wife of a French diplomat in Bangkok who seeks solace for her boredom in a variety of sexual encounters.
With its simulated sex scenes shot largely in soft focus, an exotic locale and a sentimental pop score, the film became an avatar of soft-core pornography. An immediate hit in France — it stayed at the same theater in Paris for several years — and later in Japan, where it was perceived as a triumph of feminism (mostly, Ms. Kristel pointed out, for one scene in which Emmanuelle climbs on top of her husband during sex), it was distributed in the United States by a major studio, Columbia Pictures, a relatively respectable alternative to the scandalous hits of two years earlier, “Deep Throat” and “Behind the Green Door.”
Ms. Kristel went on to appear in several Emmanuelle feature films and made-for-television movies.
According to AVN, ”Emmanuelle” is said to have earned more than $100 million. Ms. Kristel was ambivalent about her experience making the films; they allowed her to travel and opened doors for her as an actress, she said, and it was hard not to be proud of a film that so many people had seen. But the career that grew out of them was not what she had planned or hoped for.
She did act in mainstream films, working with renowned European directors including Alain Robbe-Grillet (“Playing With Fire,” 1975) and Claude Chabrol (“Alice or the Last Escapade,” 1977), starring in Mr. Jaeckin’s adaptation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (1981) and spending several years in Hollywood, where she appeared in the action-adventure film “The Fifth Musketeer” (1979); “The Nude Bomb” (1980, a reprise of the 1960s television series “Get Smart,” starring Don Adams); and the racy, very successful comedy “Private Lessons” (1981), in which she played an immigrant maid who seduces a teenager. But she was nearly always cast in sexually suggestive parts, and her performances drew considerably less attention than her face and figure.
In her 2006 autobiography, “Undressing Emmanuelle,” she wrote that she was “disappointed and a little hurt” that her more serious work went unappreciated. “I was dressed but people preferred me naked,” she wrote.
Ms. Kristel was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on Sept. 28, 1952, and grew up in a hotel owned by her parents, who separated when she was 16. She worked as a secretary before becoming a model, and when she was 20 she won the Miss TV Holland and the Miss TV Europe beauty contests.
In later years Ms. Kristel pursued a career as a painter. She directed a short animated film, “Topor et Moi,” that was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006.
She was married and divorced twice. In Hollywood, she had a volatile relationship with the British actor Ian McShane, whom she met while making “The Fifth Musketeer,” and she acknowledged that during that time she had problems with alcohol and cocaine. She also acknowledged romantic liaisons with Gérard Depardieu, Roger Vadim and Warren Beatty.
Her survivors include a son, Arthur Kristel, whose father was Hugo Claus, a Belgian artist and writer who died in 2008.
In interviews in recent years, Ms. Kristel spoke about her time as Emmanuelle with appreciative dispassion. “The series allowed me to paint for a year and live in peace,” she said in 2009. “And I think that justifies the means.”