Novak, Kim (1933—) | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Critics have never been kind to Kim Novak. They often (and wrongly) have dismissed her as a typical star manufactured by thestudio system, or as one of the many cinema's goddesses gifted with plenty of sex appeal but little acting talent. Directors have not been too kind either. Richard Quine, allegedly paying her a compliment, declared she had "the proverbial quality of the lady in the parlor and the whore in the bedroom." An embittered Henry Hathaway remembered resigning as director of Of Human Bondage (1964), which he had originally planned to film with Marilyn Monroe, because of Novak: "they made it with Stupid-what's her name-Kim Novak… I worked one day with her and quit." And yet, although briefly, audiences loved her passionately and were most receptive to her peculiar appeal as an actress, responding to it with 3,500 fan letters per week.

Born Marilyn Pauline Novak, Kim Novak's star began to shine when Rita Hayworth's started to fade. In the early 1950s, Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, decided to create another sex goddess to replace Hayworth and his choice fell on the young model Novak. She was cast as a femme fatale in Pushover (1954) by Richard Quine, and her first starring performance is already remarkable for that peculiar mixture of destructive sex appeal and extreme vulnerability which will later inform her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). In 1955, she starred in two of that year's biggest hits: the sexy comedy Picnic by Joshua Logan and the controversial Man with the Golden Arm by Otto Preminger. In both movies, Novak plays female characters who are only superficially weak and who refuse to be appreciated only as sex objects. Her slow-motion jitterbug dance with the sexy hobo William Holden in Picnic ranks as one of the most sensual scenes of the 1950s. As Kathleen Murphy puts it, "this perversely virginal blonde seemed a voluptuous projection of every smalltown Sleeping Beauty."

By the end of 1956, Kim Novak was worth at least $300,000 per film and a poll commissioned by the magazine Box Office voted her the most popular star in the United States. And yet, by that time, she also began to have a reputation for being "difficult" to work with. George Sidney, who directed Novak and Tyrone Power in The Eddy Duchin Story (1956), listed her as evidence for the belief that "hopeless poison gets into actresses when they become big stars." But Novak began to make it clear that she was unwilling to conform to the cliché of the brainless sex goddess, which Cohn had thought she would fit so well. Interviewed in 1998 on the occasion of the release of the restored copy of Vertigo, Novak declared that to the label of "difficult" she preferred that of "impudent": "I had views, or rather, instincts—like animals do. I trusted my instincts and wanted to be true to myself, so a director had to convince me of something else…."

When Vera Miles became pregnant, Alfred Hitchcock replaced her with Novak for the role of Madeline Elster/Judy Barton in Vertigo. One of the central motifs of the movie is Madeline's, and then Judy's ability to make the quasi-Pygmalion character Scottie Ferguson, played by James Stewart, fall in love with the beautiful image he has created for himself. Novak displays a remarkable ability to sustain the ambiguity and the tensions between sensuality and vulnerability, between seeming and being implied in her character. When the restored copy of the movie was re-released, Novak claimed she saw the James Stewart character as a variation on Harry Cohn, who created an actress he never thought had any quality: "Cohn wasn't interested in me as a woman. He didn't think I had anything to offer… he just didn't see you. He looked beyond you… to where the audiences were."

During the 1960s and 1970s, Novak made a series of wrong choices. She was either miscast in movies that did no justice to her abilities (The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders, 1965; Satan's Triangle, 1975; White Buffalo, 1977) or which received poor distribution (The Legend of Lylah Claire, 1968). By the end of the 1970s, after marrying her veterinarian, she decided to be less active as an actress. She appeared in a supporting role in David Hemmings's Just a Gigolo (1979), where she seduces David Bowie over the body of her dead husband, and she joined the all-star cast of the rather bland Agatha Christie's mystery The Mirror Crack'd (1980). In both movies Novak's performances are interesting for her subtle irony at the self-parodying of her own former image of sex goddess.

After appearing in the mini-series Malibu (1983) and in the extremely popular soap-opera Falcon's Crest (1986), she made a major comeback to cinema, giving very fine performances in Tony Palmer's The Children (1990) and in Mike Figgis's Liebestraum (1991). Both movies offered her complex roles. In the former she is a refined widow, courted by a man promising affection who ultimately abandons her, while in the latter she plays a tormented woman dying of cancer coming to terms with her own past. Both performances show Novak's maturity as an actress, who, as the character of Madge Owens in Picnic says, gets tired of simply being told she is beautiful. For once, a former sex goddess who did not turn to drugs, alcohol, or suicide escapes from her past image.

Brown, Peter Harry. Kim Novak: The Reluctant Goddess. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1986.

Byars, Jackie. "The Prime of Miss Kim Novak: Struggling Over the Feminine in the Star Image," Foreman, Joel, ed. The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Kleno, Larry. Kim Novak on Camera. New York, A. S. Barnes &Company, Inc, 1980.

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