Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged British novelist who is both appalled by and attracted to the vulgarity of American culture. When he comes to stay at the boarding house run by Charlotte Haze, he soon becomes obsessed with Lolita, the woman's teenaged daughter.
Acting
Irons's voiceover—simultaneously repellent and hypnotically poetic.
Cinematography
Howard Atherton makes American suburbia look edible and rotten.
Direction
Lyne walks the impossible line between condemnation and aestheticization.
Director
Adrian Lyne
Jeremy Irons
Humbert Humbert
Dominique Swain
Dolores "Lolita" Haze
Melanie Griffith
Charlotte Haze
Frank Langella
Clare Quilty
Suzanne Shepherd
Miss Pratt
Keith Reddin
Reverend Rigger
Erin J. Dean
Mona
Joan Glover
Miss LaBone
Angela Paton
Mrs. Holmes
Michael Goodwin
Mr. Beale
Ben Silverstone
Young Humbert Humbert
Emma Griffiths Malin
Annabel Lee
Ronald Pickup
Young Humbert's Father
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Nabokov hated Kubrick's 1962 adaptation; this version restores the novel's European literary sensibility and moral queasiness that Kubrick sanded off.
Dominique Swain was 15 during filming—older than Sue Lyon in Kubrick's version, but still legally unable to watch her own sex scenes at the premiere.
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