In 1962 Sellers played a retired British army general in John Guillermin's "Waltz of the Toreadors", based on the play of the same name. The film was widely criticised for its slapstick cinematic adaption, and director Guillermin himself considered the film "amateurish". However, Sellers won the San Sebastián International Film Festival Award for Best Actor and a BAFTA award nomination for his performance, and it was well received by critics. Stanley Kubrick asked Sellers to play the role of Clare Quilty in the 1962 film "Lolita", opposite James Mason and Shelley Winters. Kubrick had seen Sellers in "The Battle of the Sexes" and listened to the album "The Best of Sellers", and was impressed by the range of characters he could portray. Sellers was apprehensive about accepting the role, doubting his ability to successfully portray the part of a flamboyant American television playwright who was according to Sellers "a fantastic nightmare, part homosexual, part drug addict, part sadist". Kubrick encouraged Sellers to improvise and stated that he often reached a "state of comic ecstasy". Kubrick had American jazz producer Norman Granz record portions of the script for Sellers to listen to, so he could study the voice and develop confidence, granting Sellers a free artistic licence. Sellers later claimed that his relationship with Kubrick became one of the most rewarding of his career. Writing in "The Sunday Times", Dilys Powell commented that Sellers gave "a firework performance, funny, malicious, only once for a few seconds overreaching itself, and in the murder scene which is both prologue and epilogue achieving the macabre in comedy". Towards the end of 1962, Sellers appeared in "The Dock Brief", a legal satire directed by James Hill and co-starring Richard Attenborough.