Kim Novak, 92, Opens Up About Getting Older and ‘Feeling It’s Close to the End’

In the late ’50s, she was the No. 1 box office star in the world, but within 10 years, Kim Novak left it all behind and walked away from Hollywood.

In the decades since, she’s given few interviews, but at 92, she’s reclaiming her story in a new documentary, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, a deeply personal look at her family, her Hollywood years and her decision to live life as a painter in the woods of Oregon.  

The film premieres at the 82nd Venice Film Festival on Sept 1, the same day she’ll receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

“I think it really represents who Kim is,” says her manager and close friend Sue Cameron, who is also the film’s executive producer. “Nobody knows who she really is, nobody knows what she went through, the disasters in her childhood.” 

The film, directed by Alexandre Philippe, has an immediate intimacy. “It’s not easy getting old,”  says Novak at the outset, before noting, “I’m feeling it’s close to the end.”

As such, she continues, “I’ve been feeling the need to free something….” as she begins to unburden herself of the past. 

It’s also a story of how her life intertwined with her most celebrated film, Vertigo, of which she notes, “It’s my story too…. They want to make you over.”

“They” were the Hollywood studio heads who wanted to mold the then–21-year-old Marilyn Pauline Novak into somebody they could control. She battled with the studio system, notably Columbia Pictures President Harry Cohn, who wanted her name to be changed to Kit Marlowe (she refused) and who forbade her to continue her affair with Sammy Davis Jr.

“Every part of my life was controlled,” says Novak. “He called me ‘the fat Pollack.’ ” (Novak, who was born in Chicago, is of Czech descent.)

Her allure captivated audiences in such films as Picnic with William Holden and Man With a Golden Arm, opposite Frank Sinatra. Still, she notes, “I never felt I was a movie star.”

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the 1958 cinematic masterpiece, she found a role that allowed her to explore her own duality. Though she hadn’t yet been diagnosed, Novak later discovered she was bipolar and found parallels with her character’s story. “I always resented being made over,” she says as she watches the film, “That was why I was so right for the role.” 

She left Hollywood in 1966 after a flood destroyed nearly everything she owned. “When I left I was at the top of my game,” she says. 

As she reflects in the film, “Hollywood swallowed people whole.” Just as it did Marilyn Monroe, whom she also knew. “I didn’t want that to happen to me,” she says quietly, referencing Monroe’s tragic fate.

She moved north to Carmel, where she painted and lived quietly until she moved to Oregon, where she resides and also rides horses. “My survival mode was to paint,’” she says.

Looking back, she reflects, “I don’t have to be the pretty one now.”

“This is not a Hollywood-y documentary of famous names, this is about Kim, the person,” says Cameron. “She turned down a million dollars to write her autobiography 25 years ago. Because they wanted all the Hollywood dirt, and she says, ‘No, that’s not who I am, I won’t do it.’”

“She’s the last living golden goddess of film,” says Cameron. “And what’s more important is in this documentary, we show her as the true fighter she was for women, even way back in the ’50s, when they tried to force her to wear certain makeup, and she would go wipe it off. She was the very first woman to have her own production company.”

At the end of the film, Novak thanks the director and says, “I needed to free myself from all of these ghosts…. I mean Hollywood ghosts.”

“You’ve given me permission,” she says. “You’ve given me an appreciation of myself.”