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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSue Lyon, Star of 'Lolita,' Is Dead at 73
Sue Lyon, who at 14 was cast in the title role of Stanley Kubricks Lolita, a film version of Vladimir Nabokovs eyebrow-raising novel about a middle-aged man who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 73.
Phil Syracopoulos, a longtime friend, announced her death. He said she had been in declining health for some time.
Ms. Lyon accumulated more than two dozen film and television credits from 1959 to 1980, but she was known primarily for one: Mr. Kubricks 1962 film of the Nabokov novel, which was adapted for the screen by Mr. Nabokov himself. Some 800 girls were said to have sought the part. When Ms. Lyon was cast, Mr. Nabokov, employing the word he used in the novel, called her the perfect nymphet, although he later said that the French actress Catherine Demongeot might have been better.
The novel was scandalous when it was first published in English in 1955; the film, made when the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code still governed Hollywood, was less so in part, some critics thought, because Ms. Lyon, whose character was aged slightly for the movie, seemed too mature.
She looks to be a good 17 years old, possessed of a striking figure and a devilishly haughty teenage air, Bosley Crowther said in his review in The Times. The distinction is fine, we will grant you, but she is definitely not a nymphet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/movies/sue-lyon-dead.html
Kingofalldems
(38,458 posts)RIP Sue Lyon.
CatWoman
(79,302 posts)Peter Sellers stole that show
Kingofalldems
(38,458 posts)Last edited Fri Dec 27, 2019, 11:38 PM - Edit history (1)
3Hotdogs
(12,390 posts)preferred a hamburger over a Humberger.
Raine
(30,540 posts)I remember reading the book and seeing the film.
Glorfindel
(9,730 posts)I found the book and read it; didn't like it at all, but I was only 15 at the time. I saw the movie later and found it intensely boring. No offense intended at all to Ms Lyon. May she rest in peace.
Liberal In Texas
(13,556 posts)I feel like my past is just dissolving around me.
rusty quoin
(6,133 posts)I was a kid and she was so pretty. Im sad to hear about this.
I watched an interview with her later laughing about the music when she was introduced in the garden in Lolita. She had a good sense of humor.
Skittles
(153,169 posts)I do believe I crushed on him.
rusty quoin
(6,133 posts)MarianJack
(10,237 posts)RESIST!
kskiska
(27,045 posts)Also, the remake with Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain. The book has always been a favorite. I thought that Sue Lyon was a little old for the part, but I loved James Mason as Humbert, and Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze. The first movie was done as more of a tongue-in-cheek black comedy than the second.
nolabear
(41,986 posts)James Mason was rather creepier than Jeremy Irons (possibly because I thought Irons kind of hot). And Shelly Winters was always amazing. Sue Lyons was a little old and self possessed, but since everything was seen through HHs pathetic, victimized POV it worked.
I love Kubrick. Everything he did. But the book is more powerful.
kskiska
(27,045 posts)TexasBushwhacker
(20,202 posts)but looked older. In the remake, Dominique Swain was 15 while the film was being shot, but looked younger, young enough that the film almost didn't get released. If course, in the book she's 12. Ick