Lolita actor’s personal life became more strange and dramatic than her movies
Peering over her heart-shaped shades and sucking a red lollipop in one of Hollywood’s most iconic movie posters, Sue Lyon became immortalised as the teenage temptress Lolita even before her debut movie was released in 1962, but she was still considered under age when it came to viewing the premiere.
The 15-year-old sat in a drugstore near the cinema in her evening dress and waited up for the morning papers. She later recalled: ‘‘I read the reviews, yelled ‘Whee!’ and spilt chocolate soda over my gown. What a kick that was!’’
Only 18 months earlier Lyon, who has died aged 73, had been hand-picked by the director Stanley Kubrick from some 800 girls who had applied for the title role in his adaptation of
Vladimir
Nabokov’s controversial novel about the relationship between a sassy adolescent girl and a forty-something professor.
Kubrick, who described Lyon as ‘‘a one-ina-million find’’, was intrigued by her as soon as they met. He told Look magazine: ‘‘From the first, she was interesting to watch. Even in the way she walked in for her interview, casually sat down, walked out. She was cool and non-giggly. She was enigmatic without being dull. She could keep people guessing about how much Lolita knew about life.’’
While Lyon may have gone for the part as ‘‘a bit of a lark’’, she was serious about acting and emerged in interviews at the time as an intelligent young woman unlikely to be dazzled by fame or flattered by the inevitable fawning that went with it. Her performance was spot-on. Lolita’s exact age is fudged throughout the film and Lyon blended youthful exuberance with hints that she might have known more about sex than her mother would have liked.
The acting may have come naturally to Lyon. Two decades later she described the making of Lolita as ‘‘a joy’’ and her leading man, James Mason, as ‘‘wonderful’’. But she quickly came to resent the gruelling press and promotional side. In a rare interview for French television in 1987 she recalled: ‘‘I hated it, and people asked me the same questions over and over and over again.’’
Suellyn Lyon was born in Iowa, to Sue
Karr and James ‘‘Jack’’ Lyon. When she was only a year old, her father, who was heavily in debt, took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills.
Her mother subsequently moved the family to Los Angeles and worked as a cashier in a Hollywood hospital to support her five children, the two oldest of whom were from one of her two previous marriages. ‘‘Little Sue’’, as she was known, began work as a model, and landed a couple of early TV roles before she was 14. It was her debut in an episode of The Loretta Young Show, in 1959, that attracted Kubrick’s attention.
Her second movie, The Night of the Iguana (1964), directed by John Huston, again required her to play a teenage temptress, this time a more proactive one who seduces Richard Burton’s defrocked clergyman; once again she gave an impressive performance.
By the time it was released, Lyon had married for the first time to Hampton Fancher, an actor who would come to be best known as the screenwriter for Blade Runner (1982). She had also begun treatment for the mental illness that plagued her for the rest of her life.
Her third film was with another of Hollywood’s legendary directors, John Ford. His final film, the underrated drama 7 Women (1966), involved Lyon playing against type, as a naive young missionary in 1930s China. By this time her personal life was regularly being plundered for the gossip columns.
A handful of movies followed, including
Tony Rome (1967) with Frank Sinatra; a 1969 TV movie version of Arsenic and Old Lace; But I Don’t Want to Get Married! (1970); and Evel Knievel (1971) with George Hamilton. But her life was becoming stranger and more dramatic than any of her films.
In 1971 she married Roland Harrison, an African-american football coach. Stories appeared about their Hollywood mansion becoming a home for homeless or runaway teenagers, and they were said to have adopted a 14-year-old boy. The marriage lasted a year and ended while Lyon was pregnant.
Her third marriage, to Gary Adamson, a convicted murderer who was nine years into a long sentence at Colorado State
Penitentiary, caused a media frenzy and, she said, came at the cost of her career. By then she was working as a cocktail waitress in a Denver hotel. She divorced Adamson after a year and went on to marry twice more.
Lyon made a few more screen appearances – her final one was in 1980 – but her career had long since fizzled out. She never regretted stardom coming so quickly or being remembered as Lolita. In one of her last interviews, in 1987, she spoke warmly of Kubrick and his team. ‘‘They took care of me in every way ... I thought everybody in the movie business was nice. And then, when I found out how terrible it was, I was hurt.’’
She is survived by a daughter. –
‘‘I thought everybody in the movie business was nice. And then, when I found out how terrible it was, I was hurt.’’