Just Jaeckin

 Just Jaeckin is dead. Died yesterday. I just spent ten minutes searching for the song Just Jaeckin by Momus, only to discover I had completely made it up. He's the sort of man Momus might write a song about, but he doesn't seem to have done so. Did he do one about David Hamilton? Have I made that up too?* 

Only getting older and slower, John. 

Just was the director of Emmanuelle, The Story of O, Madame Claude, Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak. Basically, if you liked the crisply photographed erotic ennui that appears in Bryan Ferry videos, but with actually nudity, Just was your man.

In the 70's - a very different cultural landscape to now - pornography was briefly chic, and as a knock-on effect, soft-core smut also received a smear of sophistication, like the gauze over the lens, with the release of Emmanuelle in 1974. Based on the best selling novel by Emmanuelle Arsan, it starred Dutch model Sylvia Krystel as a bored Parisian housewife whose clothes keep falling of. 

Jaeckin made eight films in ten years, his last being Gwendoline, starring Whitesnake muse Tawny Kitaen as a naive but courageous girl searching China for her missing lepidopterist father. Oh, and her clothes keep falling off. Eventually, she discovers love in an underground Amazonian kingdom that looks like a Duran Duran video. Pierre Bachelet's music is lovely throughout. 

After Gwendoline, Just Jaeckin hung up his baseball cap and Hawaiian shirt and never made another film and, since 1984, has devoted himself to photography and sculpture. He was 82 when he died, meaning he spent 70 years not making hairy muffed filth for the middle-classes. But that's what you'll be remembered for, Just. That's the legacy. That and not being immortalised in song by Momus.     

*No, he did do that one.