Suellyn Lyon (July 10, 1946 – December 26, 2019) was an American actress who is most famous today for playing the title role in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, for which she was awarded a Golden Globe.

[1] Lyon's early career flourished with appearances in such high-profile films as John Huston's The Night of the Iguana (1964), John Ford's 7 Women (1966), the Frank Sinatra detective film Tony Rome (1967), and the George C. Scott comedy The Flim Flam Man (1967), but her career dropped off in the 1970s and she retired from acting after making Alligator, which was released in 1980.

In 1991, Lyon featured prominently in the artwork for Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers' single "Stay Beautiful".

Haworth had co-starred in Otto Preminger's 1960 film adaptation of Leon Uris' novel Exodus, and was under contract to him.

[10] Although Vladimir Nabokov originally thought that Sue Lyon was the right selection to play Lolita, years later Nabokov said that the ideal Lolita would have been Catherine Demongeot, a young French actress who had played the child Zazie in Louis Malle's Zazie in the Metro (1960).

Producer James B. Harris explained that 14 year-old Lyon looked older than her age: "We knew we must make [Lolita] a sex object [...] where everyone in the audience could understand why everyone would want to jump on her."

Harris said that he and Kubrick, through casting the older Lyon, changed Nabokov's book as "we wanted it to come off as a love story and to feel very sympathetic with Humbert.

Ironically, months after Lolita was released, the Hays Code was amended in October 1962 to allow "sex aberrations" on screen.

[10] Stanley Kubrick's Lolita had its world premiere on June 13, 1962, at Loew's State Theatre in New York City, two days after its press screening.

In an article published in The New York Times on June 24, a fortnight after he had reviewed Lolita, Bosley Crowther compared it to That Touch of Mink, arguing that both films emphasized cruelty towards men.

In Crowther's original New York Times review, he noted that the screenplay of film changed the tenor of the story, and Lyon was not the child of the book.

He wrote, "She looks to be a good 17 years old, possessed of a striking figure and a devilishly haughty teenage air."

[22] A contemporary review in Variety was dismissive of the production in its opening lines, "Vladimir Nabokov's witty, grotesque novel is, in its film version, like a bee from which the stinger has been removed.

It still buzzes with a sort of promising irreverence, but it lacks the power to shock and, eventually, makes very little point either as comedy or satire.

[26] I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to stardom at 14 in a sex nymphet role to stay on a level path thereafter.

She appeared in the 1969 low-budget spaghetti western Four Rode Out, top-billed over former Bonanza star Pernell Roberts, whose career was in eclipse.

In 1969, she also appeared in a TV version of Arsenic and Old Lace that starred Bob Crane of Hogan's Heroes and Helen Hayes.

[32][33] A minor hit at the box office, taking in US$4 million in rentals[34][35] (equivalent to approximately $30,093,673 in 2023[36]) against a $450,000 budget,[37] Evel Knievel was the last significant motion picture Lyon starred in.

After her marriages to Harrison and Adamson, Lyon worked in supporting roles in B-films, television films and guest spots on TV series.

and Garage Girls, the Chicago-based film featuring one of the first appearances of actor Dennis Franz got one and one-half stars from critic Roger Ebert.

In 1984, a recut version of The Astral Factor re-titled Invisible Strangler was released, making it the last time Sue Lyon appeared in a motion picture.

[42] Lyon was married five times: briefly to Hampton Fancher, actor and filmmaker;[43][33][44] photographer and football coach Roland Harrison, with whom she had a daughter;[45] Gary D. "Cotton" Adamson, a convicted murderer;[46][47][45] and Edward Weathers.

At the time Stanley Kubrick's Lolita was in production, the age of consent in the UK was 16 years old and 18 in Lyon's home state of California.