In Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert’s teenage obsession is named Dolores Haze.
The character is commonly known by the nickname Lolita, but Dolores is her given name. Sue Lyon played her in Kubrick’s 1962 film, while James Mason portrayed Humbert Humbert. Shelley Winters played Charlotte Haze, Dolores’s mother, and Peter Sellers played Clare Quilty.
Kubrick adapted the film from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel. Nabokov wrote an early screenplay, but the finished production used a revised script by Kubrick and others. Because of censorship restrictions in the early 1960s, the film presents the subject more indirectly than the novel and makes several changes to its tone and structure.
A frequent mix-up is treating Lolita as the character’s legal first name. In both the novel and film, it is a nickname used for Dolores. The name became culturally famous, but its precise fictional context is the relationship between Humbert and Dolores Haze.