Kim Novak, the 1950s screen beauty who became a big star in movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and Joshua Logan's "Picnic," said that young women watching the re-released "Vertigo" in theaters today will have no idea how true to life her role was.
In "Vertigo" she plays a complex double role as a woman whose glamorous, enigmatic image is constantly being manipulated to fill the obsessive needs and fantasies of men."I completely identified with what the character was going through," said Novak, who played the role while in her mid-20s. "Hollywood in those days was extremely manipulative. They found you and immediately wanted to change you into something else. And each time they got closer to the fantasy but farther away from the really unattainable thing, which is who you are."
Novak came to Hollywood recently from her Oregon ranch to promote the re-release of "Vertigo," the 1958 suspense thriller in which she starred opposite Jimmy Stewart. After a massive restoration project undertaken at Universal Studios, the movie, considered by some to be Hitchcock's masterwork, is currently in theaters in a stunning new 70mm print enhanced with a DTS soundtrack that brings Bernard Herrmann's mesmerising score to the forefront.
Novak, who plays a sophisticated, frosty-haired blonde made over from a Kansas-bred shopgirl, remembers a makeup room she was ushered into soon after signing with Columbia Pictures. "The wall was covered with lips - the mouths of people who were already in the movies. Then another wall was covered with noses, and another with eyes."
While her appearance was getting a makeover, the actress, born Marilyn Pauline Novak in Chicago in 1933, found out about her new name. "They'd already sent out a press release on it. Harry Cohn called me into his office and said, you're Kit Marlowe now. I was just 19, but I had this instinct that if you could hold on to something of yourself, you could survive."
"I think that had something to do with Marilyn Monroe not being able to hang on, because she didn't have a family, a foundation, a solid identity. And of course, I couldn't be Marilyn, because she was."
"So he said, `Well, what's it gonna be then?' I thought fast and came up with Kim Novak. It was close enough to Kit, and he went for it. That was an early lesson to me, that no matter how tough the person you're dealing with is, you have to have a bottom line about what you'll surrender and what you won't."
Despite the great popularity she achieved in the '50s, Novak feels that her strong will got in the way of her further success in Hollywood.
"What they really wanted was a robot," said Novak. "But I just couldn't be one, because I had always had a strong inner voice that needed to call out and breathe."
When "Vertigo" was released in 1958, critical response was tepid. "The reviewers at the time didn't get the movie," recalls Novak. "Some people watch it and just see the facade that's laid out, the motions these people are going through, but that's only the first layer. There's so much underneath that, and that's why I'm glad people are going to have the chance to see it again. I think that I was ahead of my time, and I think it was ahead of its time."