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Sue Lyon in Lolita

Sue Lyon (born July 10, 1946 in Davenport, Iowa) is an American former actress.

Sue Lyon was fourteen years old when she filmed to the role of Dolores Haze, the sexually charged adolescent and the object of an older man's obsessions in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film, Lolita. She was chosen for the role partly because her curvy figure suggested an appearance of an adult. Based on the Vladimir Nabokov novel of the same name, Kubrick's Lolita, although a toned-down version of the story, was nonetheless one of the most talked about films of its day. Only fifteen when the film premiered, Sue Lyon became an instant celebrity and won a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer – Female. When Lolita was released in 1962, Sue Lyon went to a movie house to see her own picture, but she was not permitted to enter the theater because she was a minor.

Lyon was then cast in a similar role in John Huston's The Night of the Iguana (1964), competing for the affections of Richard Burton's defrocked alcoholic preacher against the likes of Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner. Again, controversy surrounded her because of a provocative scene in the film in which Lyon is shown emerging from the water. In 1965, she played an innocent in director John Ford's last feature film, 7 Women.

Sue Lyon's stardom deteriorated rapidly and by the 1970s she was relegated to mainly secondary roles but continued to work in film and television until 1980.

Divorced in 1965 after a brief marriage to Hampton Fancher, Sue Lyon married a second time in 1970 to Roland Harrison, an African-American photographer. Racism of the day caused the couple problems and they left the United States for a time to live in Spain. The marriage soon ended in divorce and she returned to the U.S. where before long she met, married, and divorced her third husband, all while he was in the Colorado state penitentiary, convicted of murder. Her often tumultuous life led to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder for which she received treatment.

In recent years, Lyon has been quite bitter about the film that made her a star. In 1998, speaking with the Reuters news service regarding Adrian Lyne's remake of the film, Lyon said, "I am appalled they should revive the film that caused my destruction as a person."

• Sue Lyon at the Internet Movie Database