Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita adapted Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.
The film, released in 1962, is based on Nabokov’s controversial 1955 novel about Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar whose obsession with Dolores Haze drives the story. Nabokov himself wrote an early screenplay draft, though Kubrick and producer James B. Harris made further changes for the finished film.
Because of censorship restrictions, the film handles the novel’s disturbing subject matter more indirectly than the book. James Mason played Humbert, Sue Lyon played Dolores, and Peter Sellers portrayed Clare Quilty in multiple disguises.
The title can create an easy but important distinction: Lolita is both the name of Nabokov’s novel and Kubrick’s film. It is not the title of a separate source work, and the film is not an adaptation of Nabokov’s later novel Pale Fire.