Sue Lyon, a life haunted by Lolita

A lollipop in his mouth, red heart-shaped glasses. For almost 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 about twenty films, Lolita sticks to her the skin. It was her greatest achievement, earning her a Golden Globe for Best Female Breakthrough.

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 goes to castings, and saw an ad for the film. She expects nothing from it, like a distracted Lotto player who suddenly wins the jackpot.

Stanley Kubrick had already spotted her in a television show, the “Loretta Young Show”. Among 800 other young candidates, he chooses her to play a young girl victim of a pedophile relationship with a professor of French literature. But, as a jackpot, Lolita, its 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 being raised, the career of the actress questions more 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, 15 years old during the filming, played the teenager who disturbs by his beauty the old composer played by Dirk Bogarde.

From her adolescence until her death in 2019, at the age of 73, Sue Lyon also chained chaotic stories, professionally and privately. His mental state did not help. “My mother was diagnosed with bipolar late in life, she had actually been there since her late teens,” says her only daughter, Nona Harrison, 49. Sue Lyon didn't have the strong enough shoulders to become an icon.

Imposed for the title role by Kubrick

For the role of Lolita, another actress was initially considered: Tuesday Weld. Coming from the Hollywood seraglio, television and film actress – she appeared, at 13, in Alfred Hitchcock's The False Guilty (1956) – she has more experience than Sue Lyon. Stanley Kubrick had been seduced by this pretty 17-year-old blonde. It is enough to see her later in one of her first outstanding characters, a young woman capable of splitting 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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