Kim Novak, 92, finds a defiant life has its own rewards

Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958) (Pinterest via Syè Münir)

By David Belcher

Nearly 60 years after abandoning her Hollywood career, Kim Novak is about to step back into the spotlight. In fact, she’s about to do so quite a few times.

Novak, 92, most famous for her role in “Vertigo,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterwork, will be awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement on Sept. 1 at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, running Wednesday to Sept. 6. A documentary about her life, “Kim Novak’s Vertigo,” will have its world premiere at the festival that same day.

She is also about to be portrayed by Sydney Sweeney in “Scandalous,” a new movie directed by Colman Domingo, about her interracial love affair with Sammy Davis Jr., played by David Jonsson.

The two films and upcoming award have prompted Novak to reminisce about her whirlwind Hollywood era. With virtually no acting training, she was signed to a contract at Columbia Pictures at age 21 and within a few years was one of cinema’s biggest stars. But Novak, who has devoted most of her adult life to being a visual artist — her first love — and rescuing animals, has no regrets about giving it all up.

“When I left Hollywood, it isn’t like I just wrapped up my life,” she said. “Suddenly I was free to express everything on canvas and not have to be the canvas.”

In a recent phone interview from her home in Oregon, she spoke candidly about her past and her present, and her choices.

“I’m a very independent person who needs to express myself in my way, in my time,” she said. “I’m willing to compromise, but I’m not willing to be someone I’m not.”

That spirit of integrity and defiance may have been what drew the Venice Film Festival executives to honor her this year.

“This Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement celebrates Kim Novak’s legacy but also her rebellious nature,” Alberto Barbera, artistic director of the festival, wrote in an email. “Like Marilyn Monroe, she was a creature of the old studio system, molding both of them as pure objects of seduction. But unlike Marilyn, Kim fought back, refusing the gilded prison. Marilyn ended up a victim of her own success, while Kim stepped away just in time, retreating into private life.​”

Born Marilyn Pauline Novak on Feb. 13, 1933, in Chicago, she was offered scholarships twice to the Art Institute of Chicago before taking a summer modeling job after high school promoting Thor refrigerators — she was dubbed “Miss Deepfreeze” — and traveled to Los Angeles with a friend who wanted to find more modeling work. Novak was cast as a model in the movie “The French Line” (1953) and was soon discovered by a talent scout and signed to a contract at Columbia Pictures.

Harry Cohn, the head of the studio whose controlling behavior was well documented, tried to control her entire persona, but Novak fought for better roles — and got them — unlike many sex symbols at the time. She showed her acting chops in “Picnic” and “The Man With the Golden Arm,” sang “My Funny Valentine” in “Pal Joey” and scored the female lead in “Vertigo” (after Vera Miles, Hitchcock’s first choice, became pregnant). After Cohn died suddenly in 1958, at the height of Novak’s fame, the studio offered her substandard scripts, she said, and that was the beginning of the end. Despite a few more quality films, such as “Bell, Book and Candle” and “Middle of the Night,” Novak began to feel stifled.

“When he passed away, nobody knew how to control the studio, so nobody ever went out to buy scripts,” Novak said. “Harry Cohn did all of that.”

In 1966, after a mudslide wiped out her home in Los Angeles, Novak moved to the central coast of California, first to Big Sur and then to Carmel. She made a few movies after that and has occasionally granted interviews, but she has remained mostly out of the public eye, eventually moving to a ranch in Oregon in the early 2000s. She was married briefly to British actor Richard Johnson in the 1960s and then to Robert Malloy, a veterinarian, for 44 years until his death in 2020.

“Vertigo” was not a major hit when it was first released. Over time, it has come to be regarded, by some measurements, as the greatest film of all time.

For Alexandre O. Philippe, director of “Kim Novak’s Vertigo,” his lifelong obsession with “Vertigo” originally prompted him to make a movie about the final scene in the tower. Instead, he shifted to documenting Novak’s life, but with an emphasis on her most high-profile role.

“I think that there’s a vulnerability that is inherent to Kim that played out in ‘Vertigo’ absolutely perfectly, and the movie gods put her on that path,” he said in a recent video interview. “She also talks very openly in my film about how vulnerable she is. Greta Garbo, who was also extremely vulnerable, was her idol. I think there are real parallel lives there.”

Despite living quite an isolated life, Novak agreed to start shooting the day after meeting him. Philippe had caught her at a moment when she was ready and able to look at her past “from a different perspective.”

“With this documentary, I was able to let out a lot of feelings, and there were things that needed to get out and needed to be said,” Novak explained. “I felt it was an opportunity to document my life, and I was expressing a lot of ghosts in my past.”

After Venice, the film will go on to play the Deauville American Film Festival in France in early September, which she will also attend to receive another lifetime achievement award.

The European jaunt will include Novak’s first return to Venice since a whirlwind romance with Italian playboy Mario Bandini in the late 1950s, when she was in Rome to promote one of her films (she confessed to not remembering which film or what year).

“It was my very first trip abroad, and he swept me off my feet,” Novak recalled. “We went to Venice together, and I didn’t want to leave. The studio had to send someone to bring me back. Well, you know, the accent and the whole thing, it caught me off guard.”

This second trip to La Serenissima will be a more reflective one, she said.

“If it wasn’t for this honor, I wouldn’t be traveling to Italy at this stage of my life,” she said. “But it’s like a door is sort of opening by itself without me even touching it, and I just have to go and see what’s behind it.”