StoryIn 1962, the very young girl became famous by playing Nabokov’s nymphet in the Stanley Kubrick film. Few outstanding roles, a serious accident and five marriages later, the actress, who died in 2019, seems never to have really freed herself from the character who made her an icon but also the victim of a Hollywood world ruled by men.
A lollipop in the mouth, red heart-shaped glasses. For nearly sixty years, Sue Lyon has been synonymous with Lolita, and her image is associated with the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s film, released in 1962. The American actress may have played in twenty films, Lolita sticks to her. the skin. It was her biggest achievement, earning her a Golden Globe for Female Revelation.
At 14, she landed the role almost by chance. She lives in Los Angeles and then works as a model to support her family. She continues the castings, and saw an advertisement for the film. She expects nothing, like a distracted Loto player who suddenly wins the jackpot. Stanley Kubrick had already spotted her on a television show, the “Loretta Young Show”. Among 800 other young candidates, he retains her to play a young girl victim of a pedophile relationship with a professor of French literature. But, as a jackpot, Lolita, her controversy and the consequences of success will mark, for the actress, the beginning of a slow destruction, of a destiny shattered by the cinema.
At a time when the question of child actors in sexually marked roles is increasingly raised, the actress’ journey is more questioning than ever. In January, at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the film The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (“The most beautiful boy in the world”), directed by Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri, showed how Death in Venice (1971), by Luchino Visconti, had ruined the life of Swede Björn Andrésen. The latter, aged 15 during the filming, played the teenager who disturbs the old composer with his beauty, played by Dirk Bogarde.
From her adolescence until her death in 2019, at the age of 73, Sue Lyon also had chaotic stories, both professionally and privately. His mental state did not help anything. “My mother was diagnosed with bipolar late in the day, she was in fact since the end of adolescence ”, testifies his only daughter, Nona Harrison, 49 years old. Sue Lyon did not have the shoulders strong enough to become an icon.
Imposed for the title role by Kubrick
For the role of Lolita, it is another actress who was approached, at the start: Tuesday Weld. From the Hollywood seraglio, television and film actress – she appeared, at age 13, in The False Culprit (1956) by Alfred Hitchcock – she has more experience than Sue Lyon. Stanley Kubrick had been seduced by this pretty blonde of 17 years. It suffices to see her later in one of her first striking characters, a young woman able to split the shell of the cold and obsessive poker player played by Steve McQueen, in The Cincinnati Kid (1965), to imagine what Kubrick has in mind: a Lolita with skin-deep sexuality.
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