SUE LYON

(10 July 1946 - 26 December 2019)

The American actress Sue Lyon, who has died aged 73, had the most extraordinary entrance into the world of cinema when she was cast by Stanley Kubrick for the title role in his 1962 film of the Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita. She was then a budding TV performer before landing the controversial part of a young girl attracted by the film’s hero, Humbert Humbert (James Mason). Perfectly cast, Lyon won a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer but was seldom able to repeat her first talented success. Her career had begun as a model at age 13 while still at school in LA. Spotting her on The Loretta Young Show, Kubrick chose Lyon from hundreds of contenders for the part of Lolita. Then she appeared in John Huston’s film of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana, alongside Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr. She played one of the missionaries in John Ford’s last film, Seven Women, with Anne Bancroft, Margaret Leighton and Flora Robson. Apart from Tony Rome with Frank Sinatra, her career took a downward turn: The Flim-Flam Man (a.k.a. One Born Every Minute) with George C. Scott, the Western Four Rode Out, as the hero’s wife in Evel Knievel, a horror film, Crash!, with Josḗ Ferrer, and End of the World with Christopher Lee. After a few European titles and TV work, she retired from the screen in Alligator (1980). Sue Lyon had five husbands but most of her marriages lasted little more than a year. The filmmaker Hampton Fancher was the first, then the photographer Roland Harrison, with whom she had a daughter, Nona, then Gary ‘Cotton’ Adamson, Edward Weathers and finally the radio engineer Richard Rudman (from 1985 to 2002). With Harrison she adopted a 14-year-old boy, Robert. Lyon had met and married Adamson while he was in jail for murder, after which she began working for prison reform and convicts’ conjugal rights.

MICHAEL DARVELL