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Sue Lyon Biography

Sue Lyon

Biography

"How could they make a movie out of Lolita?" screamed the print ads in 1962. By changing the 12-year-old object of Humbert Humbert's lust into a 15-year-old, that's how. Selected to portray Vladimir Nabokov's celebrated nymphet was Sue Lyon, who was 14 when she won the role. Unfortunately, Lyon was unable to live up to her Lolita publicity blitz in subsequent roles: any actress could have done as well as she did in films like Night of the Iguana (1965), The Flim Flam Man (1967), Tony Rome (1967) and Evel Knievel (1971). Beset with personal problems in the 1970s and 1980s, Sue Lyon's film appearances became increasingly infrequent; later she enjoyed another brief burst of press coverage when she married a prisoner who was serving a life sentence for murder. - Hal Erickson, Rovi

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