Kim Novak American actress

Kim Novak, original name Marilyn Pauline Novak   (born February 13, 1933, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American actor best known for her dual performance as Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo (1958). Novak played both women as part of a plot to trick an acrophobic former detective (Jimmy Stewart), with whom Barton falls in love. Although not a commercial success at the time of its release, Vertigo and Novak’s performance are now celebrated as significant contributions to cinema history and to what is arguably Hitchcock’s finest film. In 2012 that film displaced—for the first time in 50 years—Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the best film of all time, as ranked by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critics poll.

As a teenager, Novak left Chicago, where she was working as a model, and moved to Hollywood to audition to be an extra in The French Line (1954), a film starring Jane Russell. She succeeded in that mission and also came to the attention of the president of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, who offered her a contract and groomed her for a career as a Hollywood sex symbol. Cohn transformed her image, instructing her to lose weight and, as another young actress named Marilyn—Marilyn Monroe—was then a rising star, suggested that she change her name. She refused to change her surname but adopted the given name Kim. She also took acting lessons and, early on, was cast in films opposite well-established actors such as Fred MacMurray (Pushover, 1954) and Jack Lemmon (Phffft, 1954).
In 1955 she was given leading roles in a number of films, including The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra, and Picnic, with William Holden; the latter is often considered her breakthrough film. In 1955 she won a Golden Globe for most-promising newcomer. In both Picnic and The Man with the Golden Arm, Novak’s characters try to deflect the infatuation of her suitors, to be more than just a sultry sex object, a challenge, it is thought, that the actress herself faced throughout her career. In Picnic, Novak’s character—a small-town young woman—laments always being “the pretty one” instead of “the smart one.” Novak earned a nomination for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for that role. In The Man with the Golden Arm, Sinatra played a master card dealer and ex-con trying to make it as a jazz drummer, a path impeded by his heroin addiction and his deceptive wife. Novak played the strip-club dancer Molly, his sympathetic former flame, who stands by him as he goes “cold turkey” in an attempt to get his life back on track.

Another standout performance by Novak was in the romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), opposite Stewart and Lemmon. Novak played an art-gallery owner who is also a witch. She is forced to conceal her true identity and choose between love (with Stewart) or her supernatural powers. In Billy Wilder’s farcical comedy Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), Novak starred as Polly the Pistol, a waitress and prostitute. Although it is considered to show her in one of her better roles, the film opened to poor reviews and was criticized for its coarseness.

Novak was the top box-office star for three consecutive years in the 1950s. The trajectory of her career began to stall, however, when she appeared in such unsuccessful features such as Kiss Me, Stupid and The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965). That career change coincided with Cohn’s death, which Novak believed had much to do with the professional struggles she faced thereafter. None of her intermittent later movies approached the success of her early films. Her most-notable later role was that of the conniving Kit Marlowe in the 1986–87 season of the television series Falcon Crest (1981–90). She retired from acting after a disagreement with the writer-director Mike Figgis during the filming of Liebestraum (1991).