Background
Novak, Kim was born on February 13, 1933 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Daughter of Joseph A. and Blanche (Kral) Novak.
Novak, Kim was born on February 13, 1933 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Daughter of Joseph A. and Blanche (Kral) Novak.
Educated in Farragut Career Academy High School, she entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after.
She was Miss Deepfreeze—beauty queen of unthawed Hesh—when Columbia recruited her. After a tiny part in The French Line (53, Lloyd Bacon), Harry Cohn “organized” her as Columbia’s backyard goddess. In a curious allusion to Hitehcock, she was the equivocal girl in Pushover (54, Richard Quine), and then in Phffft! (54, Mark Robson) and Five Against the House (55, Phil Karlson). The studio loaned her out for The Man with the Golden Arm (56, Otto Preminger), and she returned to Columbia for four films that slowly brought her into bloom. In Picnic (56, Joshua Logan), she was the insecure country belle; she was an agonized Jeanne Eagels (57, George Sidney) and a bashful chorine in Pal Joey (57, Sidney) making a marvelous, solemn lament out of “My Funny Valentine.” But it was Bell, Book and Candle (57, Quine) that first caught her special ambiguity: the witch yearning to be mortal; the beautiful woman who cries again and thereby abandons her magical powers. Quine was clearly in sympathy with her and Jame Wong Howe made her a beauty of the late 1950s.
Hitchcock then drew her into Vertigo as a substitute for pregnant Vera Miles. Less a performance than a helpless confession of herself, Novaks contribution to that film is one of the major female performances in the cinema. Among its many themes, Vertigo is about a rough young woman who gives a superb perf ormance as a kind of Grace Kelly blind to being watched, and then finds herself trapped. The “Judy” in Vertigo loves Scotty, but it is her tragedy that she can only meet his desire for her by returning to the dream woman, “Madeleine.” Vertigo contains a very subtle analysis of the ordeal and the self-obliteration in acting, and it works all the better because Novak was so direct, unschooled, and slavelike. There are actresses whose intelligence always shows—like Katharine Hepburn, Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box, or Dietrich in the Sternberg films. Then there are actresses who seem stripped of any chance of control. They are simply there, caught in the lights by the camera and the movie—like Brooks in Pandora’s Box, Karina in Pierrot le Foil, and Novak in Vertigo.
Novak was gloomily touching in Middle of the Night (59, Delbert Mann); so good in Strangers When We Meet (60, Quine) that a novelettish subject acquired the sadness of Ophuls. In the 1960s she declined: the system that created stars was fading, Novak was putting on weight and was the victim of an automobile accident. The Notorious Landlady (62, Quine) was a silly film; Boys’ Night Out (62, Michael Gordon) a stag comedy; Of Human Bondage (64, Ken Hughes and Henry Hathaway) beyond her histrionic capacity; Kiss
Me, Stupid (64, Billy Wilder), her last classic part—Polly the Pistol, wistful for domesticity and forgetting the routine of seduction; The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (65, Terence Young), a project that required a Cukor; The Legend of Lylah Clare (68, Robert Aldrich), in which she struggles to play a Dietrich-like actress; The Great Bank Robbery (69, Hy Averback); The White Buffalo (77, J. Lee Thompson), and Just a Gigolo (79, David Hemmings).
She appeared in The Mirror Crack'd (80, Guy Hamilton); on TV in Malibu (83, E. W. Swackhamer); in The Children (90, Tony Palmer); and still beautiful as a dving woman in Liebestraum (91, Mike Figgis).
Novak was a big, shy blonde, diffident about her beautiful body and forever trying to speak up and project. Many critics saw this tense endeavor and concluded that she was not an actress. But film sometimes flinches at the expertise of actresses, and the sympathetic viewer may come to realize that there was a mute honesty in Novak: she did not conceal the fact that she had been dr aval into a world capable of exploiting her. Filming seemed an ordeal for her; it was as if the camera hurt her. But while many hostile to the movies rose in defense of the devastation of Marilyn Monroe— whether or not she was a sentient victim—Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive to feeling where Monroe appears haphazard and oblivious.
Novak is the epitome of every small-town waitress or beauty contest winner who thought of being in the movies. Despite a thorough attempt by Columbia to glamorize her, she never lost the desperate attentiveness of someone out of her depth but refusing to give in. Her performances improve with time so that ordinary films come to center on her; even Vertigo (58), Hitchcock’s masterpiece, owes some of its power to Novak’s harrowing suspension between tranquillity and anxiety.
Married Richard Johnson, April 1965 (divorced 1966). Married Robert Malloy, January 1977.