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Sandra Dee (1942-2005) |
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Sue Lyon, Lolita, 1960.
Before falling for Sue Lyon - or her breasts, very large from age 13 - director Stanley Kubrick supposedly saw 800 nymphets… Sandra Dee, 15 (Mom said no); 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. Three others lived the role… Beverly Aadland, at 15, was the lover of Errol Flynn at 50! - “we’d be perfect for the film!” Germany’s Christine Kaufman, 15 at the time, wed the 20-year-older Tony Curtis at 18. And Disney's UK moppet, Hayley Mills, 14, was sorry to miss the film (on Dad and Walt Disney’s orders); eleven years later she married her lovcer-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 age of the book’s “Lo. Lee. Ta“). 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 suffered decades 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.
- Carol Lynley, The Last Sunset, 1961. Like Lauren Bacall, Universal's teenage cutie took exception to the Western's incest angle - upsetting her Tammy image.
- Tippi Hedren, The Birds, 1962. Hollywood’s Dee and Suzanne Pleshette and England’s Jill Ireland were in the frame for the poor, bird-pecked Melanie until Alfred Hitchcock fell for Hedren in a diet drink commercial. Dee was a too-young-looking 20, while Tippi was called 28 when she was really 33. Hitch gave her a seven-year contract. She made his next film, Marnie, 1963. And that was the end of his “new Grace Kelly.”
- Hayley Mills, The Chalk Garden, 1964. Joanne Woodward’s pregnancy switched the Dee-Woodward vehicle to Mills-Deborah Kerr
- Susannah York, Kaleidoscope, 1966. To qualify for British Eady Plan budget money, the cast had to be restricted to one American - and that was Warren Beatty.
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