The rebellious soul of Hollywood, as per the subtitle of the 2022 documentary dedicated to her. Kim Novak“The woman who lived infinite times”. Between films from the history of cinema, counter -current personal choices, frames transformed into icons and love stories that have marked the collective imagination (and even contributed to dismantling prejudices on mixed couples, prohibited in the sixties of Hollywood wands in the sixties), Kim novak crossed the twentieth century like a parabolic star, imposing himself with the stubbornness of those who had the best way to keep the head. assert yourself. at 92, Kim Novak will land at the Venice Film Festival to obtain the final prize, the golden lion to his career, more than forty years after his bittersweet, and definitive retreat, from the scenes.
That surname with a sudden broken stick sound, Novak, did not like industry. But yes to her. Born in Chicago like Marilyn Pauline Novak on February 13, 1933, teachers of Czech origins, as a girl is a victim of bullying by the young gangs of the malfamate neighborhood in which she lives. It is indeed targeted continuously, until things definitively degenerate and undergoes group sexual violence. He is just a teenager, he doesn’t tell anyone: ther are many problems in the family.And the father has an unproice bipolar disorder: “I inherited my mental illness by my father, but rape must have aggravated her” said kim Novak in 2022 to the Guardian, now free to be able to give voice to his memories.Just adult debuts in an advertising campaign for domestic freezers and it is then that an almost prophetic nickname, “Miss DeepFreeze” is given. A vague similarity with the name of “hot ice” that Alfred Hitchcock dedicated to Grace Kelly, seeking those characteristics in all the actresses written to replace the princess of Munich. Including Kim Novak, in fact. But at that moment Marilyn Pauline is not yet Kim novak. Within a few years he moved to Los Angeles with the idea of becoming an actress, and the stroke of luck dates back to 1954, when the producers notice it in a particle without jokes and offer them to take the place of Rita Hayworth in the criminal on duty of Richard quine.The character of the seductress shrewd,ambiguous and intelligent is a cinema topos,and she has all the attributes to interpret her on several occasions. He is forced to change the name: there is one of Marilyn’s of Marilyn, linked to the 20th Century Fox, and is decidedly cumbersome. The CEO of Columbia Pictures Harry Cohn, who has put it under contract with all the head obligations of the time, would like to rename it “Marlowe kit” and build it from scratch. But the young actress has no intention of undergoing that uprooting of her identity, holds the head of the CEO, and descends to a single compromise: the name will be Kim, short and easy to remember, but Novak remains. It is indeed the first indication of the formed ability of Kim Novak to break up without really losing herself, clinging to her personal experiences and her name to give body to unforgettable characters, and inseparable from her.
Romantic comedies, drammons, detective. Special partners inside and out of the set like Richard Quine (the director who almost became his husband), Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, William Holden, and of course the beloved James Stewart. Kim Novak’s career focuses mainly in a handful of years between fifty and sixty, when Hollywood squeezed without restrainting her protagonists then abandoned them to the first pregnancy, at the first marriage opposed by the production houses, or simply because they exceeded thirty -five years. But to choose, to tell the truth, it was her: he would never have loved to submit to the brutal impositions of the Big Five.When Alfred Hitchcock, to the spasmodic research of the protagonist of his Vertigo for which he had initially chosen Vera Miles, contacted the usual Harry Cohn for setting her on the set, Kim Novak was 25 years old and was fighting furiously with Columbia to get the weekly salary raised, considered too low for the amount of work and commitment requested on the sets. “I don’t like that someone took advantage of me” he declared to the press when the negotiation went happily to the port, leading her to earn the very respectable and much more suited a figure of three thousand dollars a week. Warned to the court of the Suspense Master, Kim Novak gave body and soul to the distinct Madeline and Judy, blonde and brunette, gray tailleur penalty (imposed by Hitchcock himself) and ferrine eyes to pierce the fourth wall. Next to her, an equally extraordinary James Stewart in an unparalleled masterpiece. Novak was felt that double role very his: years later he would instead have recognized that he had exaggerated with the acting characterization, and he also discovered that Hitchcock, unlike what he believed, had never appreciated his interpretation. The British director, in fact, had declared that he didn’t like Kim Novak at all, and according to him he didn’t even know how to act.It was true, he would have confirmed Novak herself, but then he had learned seriously. yet soon what he began to suffocate it was the same sick Star System in which he had been slipped, and who had tried to reject it for his unconventional choices.Many linked to his sentimental life: at the end of the 1950s Kim Novak had attended Ramfis Trujillo, the son of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and then start a relationship with Sammy Davis Jr., Opposed by Columbia herself who could not accept the love story between a white and a black in the terrible era of racial segregation. “They refused to let me approach Sammy’s house,” he said years later. “Sammy had already lost an eye in an accident and harry Cohn threatened to get the other. I’m sure he would ask his gangster friends to do it. Cohn was definitely entangled in the mafia,” Kim Novak confessed years later. Not even the subsequent stories with the actor Michael Brandon and the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain met public favor. “I had to leave to save myself.”
And so he did. As soon as they began to offer her roles as “Seminuda girl on the beach”, he understood that he could no longer. His marriage to the English actor Richard Johnson had lasted less than a year, and the splendid house he had bought as a personal refuge at Big Sur had been tormented in sequence by a fire and a landslide. Kim Novak’s latest film in the sixties had been a sensational flop. He chose to leave really and moved to Oregon, where he met the veterinarian Robert Malloy, which he married in 1976: a solid marriage that ended up with his death in 2020. He opted for television, who committed her differently and allowed her to free herself from the “Hitchcock blonde” label that she had never liked it, and she was the most away from her. Then he dedicated himself to music, poetry, photography and painting, exposing his colorful paintings in different exhibitions: visual art is what allowed her to cohabit serenely with bipolar disorder, which has been officially diagnosed at her at the beginning of the third millennium, and of which she has always spoken with human frankness.He did not miss health problems: Kim Novak passed breast cancer and a risky horse fall that had perforated a lung. Above all, he survived the horrible comments of 2014, when he appeared to the Oscars visibly swollen in his face for fat injections: “We do all stupid things in life” he declared after a public letter in which he lashed out against those who had criticized it. The vital thing is always to do it in its own way, as Kim Novak has taught. The woman who lived twice. Indeed, many more.
