Sue Lyon, Star of 'Lolita,' Is Dead at 73 [View all]

[CatWoman]

Sue Lyon, who at 14 was cast in the title role of Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita,” a film version of Vladimir Nabokov’s 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. Kubrick’s 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