The Venice Film Festival celebrated Hollywood actress Kim Novak on Monday, bestowing a lifetime achievement award to the reluctant star and platinum blonde heroine of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, now 92.
Novak acquired a standing ovation and prolonged applause when handed her Golden Lion award from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, forward of the world premiere of the documentary “Kim Novak’s Vertigo”, directed by Alexandre Philippe.
Wearing an emerald and black silk robe, the previous display screen siren who selected to defy the Hollywood studio system raised her arms in acknowledgement of the cheers, mouthing “thank you” to the viewers.
“I’d like to thanks the gods up there in Heaven, all of them. Not one in particular. Just all of them,” mentioned Novak. “They have given me such a gift but they they waited, they waited until it would be the most meaningful in my life, at the end of my lifetime to get this from you.”
Novak is greatest recognized for enjoying the chilling twin position of suicidal blonde Madeleine Elster and brunette store woman Judy Barton within the 1958 Hitchcock basic “Vertigo”, taking part in reverse James Stewart.
But she had a short-lived profession, refusing to just accept the iron-fisted rule of studio executives and strolling away from Hollywood lower than a decade later to concentrate on portray.
Novak was “one of the most beloved icons of an entire era of Hollywood films… until her premature and voluntary exile from the gilded cage of Los Angeles” mentioned the competition’s inventive director, Alberto Barbera, in asserting the award in June.
Novak’s different memorable roles included a big-hearted prostitute in Billy Wilder’s 1964 “Kiss Me, Stupid”, a witch in Richard Quine’s “Bell, Book and Candle” (1958) and an adulteress in one other Quine movie, “Strangers When We Meet” (1960).
In a press convention earlier Monday, Novak’s supervisor, Sue Cameron — who can be the movie’s govt producer — mentioned Novak “does not like the limelight”, preferring to “be at home with her horses and her dogs”.
“I wanted to give this as a present to her because she’s been so hidden all these years. I wanted her to have one more ‘Pow!’ in her life,” mentioned Cameron of the movie.
“She’s now 92. She exercises with weights every day. She walks. She has a 13-acre ranch with three islands on it and horses and horse meadows. She rides the horses. She walks around the meadow. She does not give up. This is not someone who acts her age,” Cameron mentioned.
After years of avoiding the limelight, Novak was a visitor of honor on the Cannes movie competition in 2013, attending a particular screening to mark the restoration of “Vertigo”.
As a presenter on the 2014 Academy Awards, Novak was topic to a wave of merciless commentary about her look.
In her later years, Novak, who was married twice, together with to equine veterinarian Robert Malloy from 1976 to his loss of life in 2020, and raised horses and llamas in Oregon and California.
© 2025 AFP