- Sue Lyon, Lolita, 1960. Deflowered at 15 during an “audition”by Errol Flynn – The Walking Penis – Beverly became his final companion. He calmed her mother down by promising to make her an actress. As she was already living the role, he took her to meet Stanley Kubrick (working his way through 800 nymphettes) but didn’t help her career prospects by insisting they were a package deal. Kubrick was actually more interested in the 50-year-old as Humbert Humbert, than Beverly as Lolita Haze. After his death in October 1959, she said they would have been perfect. ”We both had the physique du rôle.” (Presumably she meant ages). Before falling for Sue Lyon – or her breasts, very large from age 13 – Kubrick had considered Sandra Dee, 15 (Mom said no); Jill Haworth, 15 (No said Mom and Otto Preminger who had her under contract); Joey Heatherton, 16 (Dad said no); Jenny Maxwell, 19 (Elvis spanked her in Blue Hawaii the next year) ;and Tuesday Weld, 17. Two others lived the role. Germany’s Christine Kaufman, 15 at the time, wed the 20-year-older Tony Curtis at 18 – and Walt Disney’s UK moppet, Hayley Mills, 14, was sorry to miss the film (on Dad and Walt Disney’s orders), and eleven years later she married her lover-mentor-director, Roy Boulting… 33 years her senior. Author Vladimir Nabokov vetoed Brigitte Bardot, far from his ”creature”; he’d obviously never seen her at a youthful 26, opposite veteran Jean Gabin. twice her age in En cas de malheur/Love Is My Profession. 1957. (James Mason was the same age, 53, in Lolita). Instead, Nabokov voted for Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro, 1960, Catherine Demongeot… aged ten! (In 1977, Malle made his own under-age sex study, Pretty Baby – Brooke Shields at 12… the actual age of the book’s “Lo. Tee. La“). As for Sue Lyon… “My destruction as a person dates from that movie,” she declared in 1996. “Lolita exposed me to temptations no girl of that age should undergo. 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 suffereddecades of mental instability, five marriages and abandoned a child – though less to do with the actual film than with Kubrick’s producer, James B Harris (32), making her his mistress at age 14.
Birth year: 1942Death year: 2010Other name: Casting Calls: 1