The enduring cinematic image of actor Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo, captures her in a tailored grey suit created by legendary costume designer Edith Head, her hair swept into a chignon, an enigmatic, tragic expression etched across her face.
Novak may not have been the only Hitchcock blonde – she shares that honour with Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh, Eva Marie Saint and others – but she captured the essential qualities of the part in a way few of her peers did. The ice-cold elegance. The steely, impenetrable gaze. The simmering, subcutaneous passion.
In a way, the woman created the image. But in cultural history, it is the image that has endured. What underlines its power is that at the height of her fame, in the late 1960s, Novak turned her back on Hollywood. And it has taken almost five decades for the actor, now 93, to make her peace with the iconic image that bears her likeness.
“I feel guilty sometimes that I didn’t try to do more in films because I walked away from Hollywood, but I didn’t want to stay around waiting for the right role,” Novak says, candidly. “Sometimes when I see a really good movie, I think maybe I made the wrong choice. But then again, I think it was the right choice.”
The greatest fulfilment of her life? “Without question, being able to paint, being able to express myself,” Novak says, her words coming with almost visceral expression. She exhales. Her voice hums with passion. “It is such a luxury, and it’s something that if more people could do it, they would find in their lives feeling more fulfilled.”
Sitting down to talk to Miss Novak, as I call her, we have to start by unpacking the clichés: the Norma Desmond-esque journey of a movie star whose origin story springs from the foundation of cinema itself, and whose later life is defined by a slow, deliberate withdrawal into a remote and personal world, far from the prying eyes of Hollywood. That woman doesn’t exist beyond the headline.
At the same time, there are two living, breathing women in this conversation with me: Kim Novak, the carefully constructed Hitchcock blonde who adorned movie posters and sensually captured the audience’s eyes, and beside her, the other – real – Kim Novak, born Marilyn Pauline Novak, who is sensitive and shy, and who reflects tenderly on both her film career and her family life.
In Kim Novak’s Vertigo, a new documentary directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, the actor says: “I kind of like the duality, the sort of push/pull, negative/positive, I like to get that contrast.” Though many actors have wrestled with their reflected image, few people understand the strange, alchemical relationship between the actor and the distorted reflection in the mirror more than Novak does.
Novak, born in Chicago in 1933, launched her Hollywood career at the age of 21 with a Columbia Pictures contract. She came from the modelling world and was, at the studio’s direction, carefully manufactured to be successor to iconic sex symbols such as Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe.
But slowly and subtly, Novak broke the mould. She starred in Picnic (1955), based on the William Inge play, and drew wide acclaim. Legendary director Otto Preminger cast her in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), as Frank Sinatra’s ex-girlfriend. And then, in 1958, Hitchcock cast her in Vertigo, when the actor to whom he intended to give the film’s dual roles, Vera Miles, withdrew.
Based on the 1954 novel, D’entre les Morts, (The Living and the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo starred James Stewart as a detective whose career ended due to a severe fear of heights, and whose later private investigation into Madeleine Elster (Novak) reveals a second, identical woman, Judy Barton (also played by Novak), around whom a murderous conspiracy begins to unfold.
The film was, you might say, peak Hitchcock. It stretches a seemingly simple plot until it is almost unbearably taut. It blends obsession, guilt and murder with psychological trauma. It is remembered for lingering silences. And it plays with the art of cinema itself, leaning into the mechanics of the motion picture camera to pull off extraordinary visual twists in a pre-digital age.
The result is a haunting masterpiece which remains a foundational text for modern suspense filmmaking.
But while Hollywood found it easy to define Novak’s cinematic contemporaries – Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Russell and others – Vertigo bound Novak to Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton in a way that is felt even to this day. The film cast a long shadow from which Novak struggled to break free.
“For me, for most actors, they’re pretending to be someone else [but] for me, I had to always become that person,” she says. “I didn’t have the background of pretending, of learning how to pretend. I instead completely got into the person I was playing.”
The success of Vertigo was transformational for Novak, elevating her into the role of one of the most famous actors in the world. But it also became an unexpected straitjacket: leashing her to a style of performance, and a type of character, that subsequent directors and screenwriters would try – and fail – to push her into over and over again. That loss of cinematic realism was deeply damaging, she says.
“Luckily in my career, especially the first few years, I had the amazing opportunity to work with some really good directors and brilliant writers where I could read the script and know almost all the dialogue automatically because it was so real,” Novak says. “It was easy to become that person.”
But later, “there were roles that were not very good. They didn’t make sense, they weren’t real, they didn’t connect”, she says. “So, I was particularly bad, I think, on scripts that were not worthwhile. I couldn’t make them [work]. I couldn’t make myself feel like I was that person because it wasn’t a real person. I had a hard time with that.”
By the late 1960s, Novak was done with Hollywood. When she lost her Bel Air home to mudslides, she moved to Big Sur, on California’s central coast, and slowly shifted her focus away from acting and towards painting and poetry.
An assortment of roles followed sporadically: the horror anthology, Tales That Witness Madness (1973), the mystery thriller, The Mirror Crack’d (1980), and even the television soap opera, Falcon Crest (1986-1987), opposite another film icon, Jane Wyman – but the spell was broken. The actor had, for the most part, departed the stage.
As a painter, Novak says, she found greater fulfilment. “There is no comparison,” she says. “Because when you’re painting, you’re the director, the producer, and the actor. You’re everything. And it’s me listening to my voice, listening to my interpretation. I didn’t respond well to [badly written roles] because I needed to believe it in order to be it. And in my art, I’m able to.”
Though she is largely reclusive today, living on a remote farm in America’s Pacific Northwest, Novak does periodically step back into focus. In 2025, she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival. Kim Novak’s Vertigo premiered at the same festival.
From first meeting to final cut, the documentary is a compelling exploration of Novak’s life. She let the director into her attic, unsupervised, from which he retrieved artefacts from her career: scripts, items of wardrobe, long-forgotten keepsakes. “He went into the attic of my mind as well,” she quips. And when they were not together, she recorded audio files reflecting on her life.
Among the unearthed treasures: Madeleine’s now iconic grey suit from Vertigo, found in Novak’s attic, still in pristine condition. Mere fabric and stitching, it is of course so much more: an almost talismanic piece of the complex puzzle of Novak’s life.
“It represents so much,” Novak says. “It didn’t seem like the right idea [at the time]. And Alfred Hitchcock said, ‘my dear, you’re going to wear that grey suit’. So, I had to make it work. I didn’t like it. I didn’t feel it was right somehow. But I was wrong in retrospect.”
The documentary is ostensibly the story of Novak’s performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated psychological thriller, but in practice becomes an unexpectedly intimate exploration of her relationship with fame, her abandonment of her career at the peak of its success, and, eventually, the reconciliation of her various facets: the woman, the artist and the echo of the Hitchcock blonde.
When she finally saw the documentary in Venice, Novak says she felt “exposed somehow. Almost like I was seen naked in a way because I was showing him my inner thoughts. I felt in some ways almost violated in the sense that I was showing to the whole world me”.
But then, Novak says, she rationalised it. “I thought, it’s OK because it’s the end of my life. And I justified it in my mind, I guess, by thinking, why not let people know who I am and why I am? I revealed more than I realised I revealed. Well, why not? It’s part of why I am and who I am.”
What is less certain is whether in retreating from Hollywood, Novak found real freedom from the shackles of fame, or merely regained a measure of her power over it. In our conversation, she speaks gently and tenderly about her career. But she cannot be unaware of her presence. Nor the fact that I am, despite three decades of meeting Oscar-winning directors, writers and actors with good-natured professional indifference, wholly in her thrall.
Her finest performance? “Vertigo, but also Picnic,” Novak says. Her finest leading man? “Without a question, Jimmy Stewart,” she says. “He was somebody who his work ethic was like mine. We worked so well together. He was so easy to work with. And in his being, his very essence was someone of comfort and feeling wonderful.”
And the best director she ever worked with? The answer might surprise you. It is Otto Preminger, who directed her in The Man with the Golden Arm. But also Hitchcock, she adds, after I express my surprise at his omission. “Because he allowed you to have your own thoughts of the character,” she says. “He never got into your mind. He only cared about the technical things.”
And her happiest memory? “When I got liberated from Hollywood,” Novak says. “Oh my gosh, it was like being reborn. It was like a chance to really discover who I really was and what mattered to me, what I believed.
“After Hollywood, you feel like people are judging you by how much money you make or how successful you are, all of these things,” Novak adds. “I needed to find out how worthy I was. I needed to be authentic, I needed to be real. And I have had the most incredible, beautiful life.”
Kim Novak’s Vertigo is screening as part of a Kim Novak season at the Melbourne International Film Festival, until August 23. A panel discussion, Hollywood Heretic: The Many Faces of Kim Novak, will be held at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre on August 16. The documentary will be released for streaming on SBS on Demand on August 24.
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