Sue
Lyon – Actress
Born
July 10, 1946; died December 26, 2019
Sue
Lyon, who has died aged 73, will forever be associated with Lolita, the title role
of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, published seven
years earlier. The name of the character played by Lyon was actually Dolores Haze,
but she was gifted the nickname by James Mason’s middle-aged professor of
French literature, Humbert Humbert, who becomes obsessed with the teenage girl.
Lyon was only fourteen when she was chosen from more than 800 auditionees. The
girl in Nabokov’s novel was twelve, with Kubrick adding a couple of years to
fit in with Motion Picture Production Code standards. Kubrick described his new
star as “the perfect nymphet.”
“From
the first, she was interesting to watch,” Kubrick told Look magazine of his new
charge. “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.”
Bert
Stern’s photograph of Lyon as Lolita, sucking on a red lollipop while wearing
heart-shaped sunglasses, appeared on the film’s poster alongside a tag-line
that asked ‘How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?’ The photograph defined both
Lyon and the film’s image ever after. The name Lolita itself became a wilfully sensationalist
tabloid byword for underage girls involved in front-page scandals with older
men.
Lyon’s
performance as Dolores/Lolita won her a Golden Globe award for most promising
newcomer, and she released a record singing two songs from the film, Lolita Ya
Ya, and Turn Off the Moon. The film was the high spot of what over the next
eighteen years turned out to be a sporadic film career.
Suellyn
Lyon was born in Davenport, Iowa, the youngest of five children to Sue Kerr
Lyon and James M. Lyon. Her father died when she was ten months old, and her
mother initially moved the family to Dallas, then to Los Angeles three years
later. It was here Lyon pursued acting, and aged thirteen she appeared as a
spoilt student in an episode of anthology series, Letter to Loretta (1959), and
an uncredited role in an episode of Dennis the Menace (1960). It was on Letter
to Loretta that Kubrick first spotted Lyon, and after Lolita’s release, she
became flavour of the month.
Lyon
was cast as another precocious teenager in John Huston’s adaptation of
Tennessee Williams’ play, The Night of the Iguana (1964), in which she vied for
the attention of Richard Burton’s de-frocked priest in competition with Ava
Gardner and Deborah Kerr. In John Ford’s 7 Women (1966), Lyon played a
missionary in 1930s China alongside Anne Bancroft. She played a rich girl who
gets involved with an army deserter and a con-man in Ivan Kershner’s The
Flim-Flam Man (1967), later known as One Born Every Minute, and a millionaire’s
daughter causing trouble for Frank Sinatra’s tough private investigator in Tony
Rome (1967). There were also turns in Arsenic and Old Lace (1969), as a U.S.
marshal’s wife in Four Rode Out (1969), and in TV movie, But I Don’t want to
Get Married! (1970). In Evel Knievel (1971), she played the real-life stunt
motor-cyclist’s wife.
In
real life, Lyon married five times, though all of the relationships were
short-lived. Her first husband, Hampton Fancher (1963-1965), was an actor who
went on to co-write the screenplay for Blade Runner. Her second husband was football
player, Roland Harrison (1971-1972). The pair had a daughter, Nona Harrison,
who has written in social media posts how her parents never wanted children,
and that she was distanced from both of them. Harrison also wrote that her
mother had been diagnosed with bi-polar manic depressive disorder from an early
age.
Lyon
wed her third husband, Cotton Adamson (1973-1974), in Colorado State
Penitentiary, where he was serving a prison sentence for second degree murder
and robbery. Lyon blamed her career’s increasingly diminishing returns on the
marriage.
“I’ve
been told by people in the movie business, specifically producers and film
distributors, that I won’t get a job because I’m married to Cotton,” she said. By
the time she wed Edward Weathers (1983-1984) and Richard Rudman (1985-2002),
Lyon’s acting career was long over.
Lyon never
managed to shake off the Lolita tag. Murder in a Blue World (1973) was an
Italian-made piece of post Clockwork Orange schlock in which her character had
a copy of Nabokov’s novel on her bedside table. In The Magician (1973), she was
an American tourist who marries an older blind man for his money.
She
played the young wife who caused an accident that left her older husband played
by Jose Ferrer wheelchair-bound in occult thriller, Crash! (1976), and starred
opposite Christopher Lee in plodding low budget sci-fi feature, End of the
World (1977). Guest roles in TV shows such as Police Story and Fantasy Island
and a couple of disaster movies followed.
Lyon’s
last appearance onscreen was in 1980 as a news reporter in the John Sayles
scripted monster satire, Alligator. Lyon was not yet 35, and by rights should
have been in her acting prime. While there was some truth in what she said
about the reaction to her marriage to Adamson, her career’s end might also have
had something to do with an industry that couldn’t accept Lyon as anything
other than ‘the perfect nymphet.’
Lyon
is survived by her daughter, Nona Harrison.
The Herald, January 13th 2020
ends
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