According to “New York Times”, which quotes a close friend of the actress, Sue Lyon died Thursday evening in Los Angeles
Lolita is gone… The American actress Sue Lyon, known for having interpreted the character of Lolita in the film of the same name by Stanley Kubrick, an adaptation of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, died at the age of 73, announced the New York Times.
Born in July 1946, she was chosen at the age of 14 to play in the film by Stanley Kubrick, released in 1962. She had won a Golden Globe for this performance. The director had wanted his actress to be older than the character Lolita is in Nabokov’s book, to avoid scandal.
A “perfect nymphet”
Always in order to escape censorship, Stanley Kubrick had voluntarily mitigated the most provocative aspects of the novel, which narrates a paedophile relationship between a teenage girl and an adult man who becomes her stepfather.
As the New York Times recalls, Nabokov had qualified Sue Lyon of “perfect nymphet” to interpret Lolita, before declaring later that he would have liked to see the French actress Catherine Demongeot, who played in Zazie in the subway, in this role.
After Lolita, Sue Lyon acted in around twenty films before ending her career in 1980.
