Sue Lyon, star of the Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, has died at the age of 73. The film, satire to some, borderline pornography to others, is a classic of the 1960s pre-MPAA rating era, walking just up to the line of acceptability under the production code of the time. The image of Lyon wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and sucking a red lollipop beneath the tagline “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” is one of the most iconic posters in all movie history.
They made a movie of Lolita, in which a literature professor becomes sexually obsessed with a teenage girl, by avoiding some of the more explicit scenes from the book and being intentionally vague about the age of title character.
Delores “Lolita” Haze is 12-years-old in Nabokov’s original. Lyon was 14 when cast, 15 during the bulk of production and 16 when the film was released 1962. If all you know about the story is that a middle aged man (the unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert, played by James Mason) is a creep who preys upon his stepdaughter, Lyon may surprise you by not playing the role as a wide-eyed victim.
In 1963 she shared the Golden Globe for “Most Promising Newcomer — Female” with Patty Duke and Rita Tushingham.
The film was tremendously controversial and popular, and it brought Lyon some recording success with a single of Lolita Ya-Ya, a catchy tune featured in the film. She next appeared opposite Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr in John Huston’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana, then with Anne Bancroft and Margaret Leighton as missionaries in China in John Ford’s 7 Women. Other notable films include 1967’s Tony Rome starring Frank Sinatra and 1971’s Evel Knievel in which George Hamilton starred as the motorcycle-riding daredevil. She also had guest spots on popular 1970s television series like Love, American Style, Police Story and Fantasy Island.
Suellyn Lyon, born in Davenport, Iowa, had five marriages. Her first was to Hampton Fancher from 1963 to 1965. Fancher was an actor on television westerns who went on to become a screenwriter. He is best known for co-writing Blade Runner. Lyon’s second husband was Roland Harrison, an African-American photographer with whom she had her only child. Controversy surrounding their interracial marriage forced them to live as expatriates in Spain. Husband three, Gary “Cotton” Adamson, was unusual in that their marriage ceremony took place in 1973 at the Colorado State Penitentiary where he was incarcerated for second-degree murder and robbery. They split up in 1974 after Adamson broke out of prison and robbed a bank. She divorced her fifth husband in 2002.
Her final film was a bit part in the John Sayles-penned killer-animal-on-the-loose exploitation picture Alligator from 1980, in which a giant sewer reptile terrorizes Chicago after being flushed down the toilet.