Subject
Shelley Winters on the role of Vivian Darkbloom in LOLITA
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Date
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Shelley Winters (from SHELLEY II: THE MIDDLE OF MY CENTURY) on Vivian Darkbloom and dance at the high school gymnasium (pp. 351):
Stanley Kubrick kept watching Mary Noble [a little-known actress and a close friend of Shelley’s who was also in London at the time], who had long red hair, and when she chose to, could be a bit of a vamp. That night he cast her as Clare Quilty’s mysterious lady friend. Clare Quilty was of course played by Peter Sellers. I don’t believe even Mary ever really understood her role. She was sort of Peter Sellers’ alter ego, also his mistress, or his procurer. She was funny and eerie in the picture, but she would never question Kubrick about her motivations. British theater manners. I guess she didn’t have to.
(pp. 360-61):
We finally came to the scene of the dance in the high school gym, where Mary Noble, playing Peter Sellers’s weird girlfriend, confronts me. This scene took several days to shoot, and I spent most of the time running around the gym trying to catch James Mason, who was looking hither and yon for Lolita. What none of us knows at that point in the story is that Lolita has already made contact with Peter Sellers’s character, Clare Quilty, and she plans to run away with him. [EDNOTE. Here Winters seems to be telescoping the film’s plot somewhat; Lolita already has a crush on Quilty, and Quilty remembers having met Charlotte’s daughter, but there’s no evidence that their affair is already underway. * SES.] It took the art director many days to make a British gymnasium look like an American gymnasium, and even then he never got it right. It just looked like a weird gymnasium.
Stanley Kubrick kept watching Mary Noble [a little-known actress and a close friend of Shelley’s who was also in London at the time], who had long red hair, and when she chose to, could be a bit of a vamp. That night he cast her as Clare Quilty’s mysterious lady friend. Clare Quilty was of course played by Peter Sellers. I don’t believe even Mary ever really understood her role. She was sort of Peter Sellers’ alter ego, also his mistress, or his procurer. She was funny and eerie in the picture, but she would never question Kubrick about her motivations. British theater manners. I guess she didn’t have to.
(pp. 360-61):
We finally came to the scene of the dance in the high school gym, where Mary Noble, playing Peter Sellers’s weird girlfriend, confronts me. This scene took several days to shoot, and I spent most of the time running around the gym trying to catch James Mason, who was looking hither and yon for Lolita. What none of us knows at that point in the story is that Lolita has already made contact with Peter Sellers’s character, Clare Quilty, and she plans to run away with him. [EDNOTE. Here Winters seems to be telescoping the film’s plot somewhat; Lolita already has a crush on Quilty, and Quilty remembers having met Charlotte’s daughter, but there’s no evidence that their affair is already underway. * SES.] It took the art director many days to make a British gymnasium look like an American gymnasium, and even then he never got it right. It just looked like a weird gymnasium.