Vertigo star Kim Novak opens up: 'I wasn't cut out for Hollywood'

The star of Vertigo and Pal Joey, who was the world’s top box-office actress in the late 1950s, turned her back on Hollywood more than four decades ago.

She is famed as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s archetypal ice-cold blondes with porcelain froideur but Kim Novak insists that her problem has always been the opposite.

“I felt too much,” says the reclusive 83-year-old in a rare interview.

“I was always too sensitive and for me Hollywood was always painful and hard to endure.”

She won acclaim in movies including The Man With The Golden Arm and Picnic, and starred opposite Jimmy Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Kirk Douglas and Tyrone Power, yet at the height of her success she turned her back on it all.

“I wasn’t cut out for a Hollywood life,” she says. “I hadn’t trained as an actress and I wasn’t prepared for the price you had to pay for success.

“I loved acting but everything else about Hollywood was painful – the press, the critics, the studios telling me who to be, what to call myself, how to behave, who I could go out with, who not to go out with, how to wear my hair, my make-up. I was treated like a piece of meat. I found it greatly insulting because I wanted to preserve my own identity, not become just another sex symbol.”

Born Marilyn Pauline Novak to Czech parents she fought to keep her own name when the tyrannical chief at Columbia Pictures Harry Cohn demanded that she change it to Kit Marlowe.

She says: “I knew I couldn’t be Marilyn because Monroe already had that taken but I refused to change Novak.”

Cohn, who called her “the dumb, fat Polack” and read her bad reviews to her face, cruelly ended her romance with Sammy Davis Jr, threatening to gouge out his other eye (he lost his left eye in a car accident) and ensure that she never worked in Hollywood again.

Tormented, Novak didn’t realise she was suffering bipolar disorder, belatedly diagnosed only 15 years ago.

“Life could be a roller-coaster,” she admits.

“At times I felt so good, I could do anything. At other times I was so depressed it was hard to do anything. I didn’t understand what was going on.

“Now I’m on medication that keeps me on an even keel but back when I was acting and feeling depressed thank goodness I had my art. It has been everything for me,” says Novak, who was a Chicago art student when she won the Miss Deepfreeze beauty pageant in 1953 and was spotted by Hollywood talent scouts.

“I was able to sketch and paint in my dressing room. I don’t think I could have survived Hollywood without my art.”

Today her paintings command high prices and have been exhibited around the world. But decades away from Hollywood left Novak unprepared for the unforgiving expectation that she would still look like a vintage sex symbol when she appeared at the Academy Awards in 2014 to present an Oscar to Matthew McConaughey.

She was devastated by the tsunami of criticism for her appearance. Donald Trump sniped that Novak should “sue her plastic surgeon,” while others suggested that her face would have been more appropriate presenting to that year’s best animated movie Oscar: Frozen.

“I made a mistake having fat injections in my face just days before the Oscars so my face still looked puffy,” she explains.

“A couple of days later I looked fine. Now I’m feeling good and looking good. Things couldn’t be better.”

But the attacks reminded her of why she left Hollywood in the first place. “I don’t like bullying and that’s what it was, bullying. It hurt me. I’m a very sensitive person. I’d never have plastic surgery. What’s the point? I like the way I look. As an artist I don’t have to think about staying beautiful.”

For Kim it was painfully reminiscent of her battles in Hollywood when she struggled to control her own image and the studios perceived her as “difficult”.

“My destiny changed when Harry Cohn died and the roles coming to me were no longer good ones,” she says.

“They were silly roles in stupid scripts of no value. Beach movies! Or the same old glamour parts that offered little that was interesting in the way of character. I loved acting but I had nowhere to go with my career. I didn’t want to keep fighting for roles. I’m not a fighter.

“As a woman in Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s you weren’t respected or given the dignity of being yourself off-screen. Every moment had to be fabricated for public consumption and it was killing me. I didn’t want to become just a sex object so I left and followed my destiny as an artist.”

Novak retreated to America’s unspoiled wilderness, first to California’s dramatic coastal Big Sur, and for the past three decades to her 43-acre ranch on the Rogue River in Oregon, with her veterinarian husband Robert Malloy.

“It’s been a beautiful marriage, sheer paradise and a beautiful life,” she says.

“My best friend bet that it wouldn’t last a year. We’re still together after four decades. We didn’t have any children but I have no regrets, it wasn’t meant to be.”

Oregon’s rugged natural beauty nourishes her in ways that Hollywood’s manicured lawns and regimented backyard pools never could.

“I get all my inspiration from nature.”

Her work in oils, acrylics and watercolours is vibrant with rich hues and deeply felt emotion, ranging from surreal canvases to photo-real portraits.

“My studio is just off my bedroom and I paint every morning when I wake and every night before I go to bed. I have my horses and birds, dogs and llamas. I ride every day, kayak on the river or run the trails. You’re as young as you feel and I stay very active.”

She beat breast cancer six years ago, returning to LA for treatment, and admits: “Strangely it was a happy time for me. I felt like I was on vacation, going for bike rides along the beach between treatments. And I had my art.”

Despite her years happily away she says: “I have regrets every now and then. I’ll see a movie I should have done and think maybe I should have given more to my career. I get offered roles on occasion but nothing I’ve felt I have to do. I suppose if a great director offered me a great role I might come back." 

Novak wrote her memoirs – but no one will read them: “It was a cathartic experience, reliving the highs and lows, in pleasure and pain but my memoirs were lost when my house burned down a few years ago. Writing them was an incredible experience but I don’t want to relive it all again, once was enough.

“I’m happy now and I have everything I need. I have my horses, my painting and I have a really good life. Things don’t bother me any more.”