Emily (1976 film)

1976 British erotic film directed by Henry Herbert, 17th Earl of Pembroke

Emily, also known as The Awakening of Emily, is a 1976 British erotic historical drama film set in the 1920s directed by Henry Herbert, produced and written by Christopher Neame, and starring Koo Stark. The story revolves around a seventeen year old girl who is pursued by various middle aged men and women. The main setting of the film is Wilton House, which was the director's ancestral seat, and the countryside around it. Richard Walker (Victor Spinetti), her mother's lover, is a middle aged man about town who quietly sets his sights on Emily, while a young American writer and schoolteacher named James Wise (Richard Oldfield) tries to impress her by sensual acrobatics in his flying machine. However, her first sexual experience is an encounter with a woman — Augustine Wain (Ina Skriver), a Swedish painter who lives nearby. Emily then has her first sexual encounter with a man, Wain's husband, the middle aged Rupert Wain (Constantin de Goguel) in a scene indicating penetrative sex. Meanwhile, perhaps intended to mark the contrast in the sexual mores of the different British classes at the time, housemaid Rachel (Jane Hayden) and her soldier boyfriend Billy (David Auker) are engaged to be married, but Rachel tries to insist on waiting until after their wedding before they have sexual intercourse. Sarah Brackett as Margaret Foster who also wrote the screenplay, claiming to have completed it in seventeen hours. It was intended as a vehicle for him to move into production, and Emily did indeed become his first film. He secured the services of Henry Herbert as director, together with his large house and estate in Wiltshire as location. Neame later wrote that this was "a country house of faded grandeur, but it suited the narrative well with its plush reds and rich greens, all set in a golden landscape". His first had been Malachi's Cove (1974), starring Donald Pleasence,
which he had both written and directed, based on a short story by Anthony Trollope. The art director of Emily, Jacquemine Charrott Lodwidge, had also worked on Malachi's Cove. The film editor, Keith Palmer, had worked with Lodwidge on another country house picture, Blue Blood (1973), filmed at the nearby Longleat House. The film was Peter Bennett's first as assistant director. Around that time the film was often shown on HBO and other cable TV channels.

The critics did not like the script. Alan Brien wrote in The Observer that Neame and Herbert should have been less tame with a scene in the drawing room, as censorship had been relaxed and the sexuality could have been more explicit. For Kenneth Tynan, Emily "failed to get to first base" in his realm of eroticism. In their book Great Houses of England & Wales (1994), Hugh Montgomery Massingberd and Christopher Simon Sykes later wrote: "The present Lord Pembroke is (as Henry Herbert) a film and television director, best known for the Civil War drama series By the Sword Divided and for Emily, starring Miss Koo Stark." The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore went to see the film while at school, expecting a skin flick, thanks to sensational press coverage, and later described it as "one of the biggest disappointments of my adolescence".

In 1983, the film was rejected by the British Board of Film Classification because of a scene showing two women embracing in a shower.

The film's leading lady, Koo Stark, suffered in later years from press misrepresentation. In a libel action in 2007, she won an apology and substantial damages from Zoo Weekly, which had described her as a porn star. She commented "I am relieved that my name has been cleared of this false, highly damaging and serious allegation." In June 2019 Stark again won damages for libel in an action against Viacom, whose MTV company had referred to her in the same terms.