FILMING VLADIMIR NABOKOV!S CONTROVERSIAL 1955 novel about an older man’s obsession with a teenage girl would be a daunting task for any filmmaker, so it’s only fitting that one of cinema’s greatest visionaries eventually took on the project. Stanley Kubrick rewrote much of Nabokov’s screenplay and danced a very precarious jig with the censors to bring Lolita to life - doing such a fine job that the titular heroine’s very name will forever be associated with sex, danger and the forbidden.
James Mason took the rather unenviable role of Humbert Humbert, a professor who finds himself unhealthily fixated on Lolita (Sue Lyon), the 14-year-old daughter of his landlady, Charlotte (Shelley Winters). It’s a tense, troubling story which still shocks to this day.