Kim Novak

The last great glam­orous movie star from Hollywood’s Gold­en Age, a free-spir­it­ed pio­neer and a com­plete artist, Kim Novak holds a spe­cial place in the pan­theon of cin­e­ma. Through her sin­gu­lar act­ing career, she bucked con­ven­tions to become one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing icons in Amer­i­can film.
Not hav­ing planned on an act­ing career, Kim Novak, a Chica­go art stu­dent, was scout­ed by Colum­bia Pic­tures while on a trip to Cal­i­for­nia in 1954 as part of a mod­el­ing tour. A rare feat for a neophyte,
she was cast in the lead role in Phil Karlson’s fea­ture 5 Against the House at the behest of stu­dio head Har­ry Cohn. Her career prompt­ly took off and she nabbed role after strik­ing role in works by well-known film­mak­ers: Joshua Logan’s Pic­nic (1955), Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Gold­en Arm (1955), George Sidney’s Jeanne Engels (1957), Richard Quine’s Bell Book and Can­dle (1958), Bil­ly Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stu­pid (1964), and Robert Aldrich’s The Leg­end of Lylah Clare (1968). In 1958, she passed into leg­end with Alfred Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go. Her aster­ly per­for­mance, along­side James Stew­art, became one of the most com­ment­ed-upon and ana­lyzed in all of film history.