In Alexandre O. Philippe’s new documentary, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, the golden age star opens up about her difficult childhood.
The 92-year-old former leading lady, best known for her role opposite James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), revealed that her mother attempted an abortion while she was pregnant with her.
“The Depression caused so much hardship,” she says in the documentary, according to People. “My mom got pregnant, and she just couldn’t afford to have a child. She tried to abort me with knitting needles. But she wasn’t able to do it in this case, so I was born, but I know that she tried to suffocate me with a pillow, and I always had breathing issues.”
She continues: “I do remember fighting to breathe, to stay alive, and I won. I stayed alive. I made it through.”
“I so often think of my childhood as not being a good healthy childhood, but it was, you know,” she tells Philippe. “There were beautiful things. My father was a very strict man and difficult.”
Her father, she says, struggled with repressed emotion. “He had so much passion, but it was, like, locked up," she says, adding, “If a person doesn’t ever get it out, I think that sometimes they feel like they’ve failed. When I took him to Czechoslovakia (Novak is of Czech descent), he got these intense migraines. He couldn't take that I was successful. I mean, I think, I have to assume that he was proud of me, but he never showed it.”
Happily, her relationship with her mother improved and she became a source of encouragement.
“My father was like, no one can succeed, but my mom was very confident, and her eyes sparkled and twinkled and she was so full of wanting to express the joy of life,” she says. “I can still hear her telling me, or really making me tell me by looking in the mirror that I am the captain of my own ship, that I can be in charge of myself and what I do and how I create my image to the world.”
Last week, Novak criticized the title of Scandalous!, a forthcoming biopic about her 1957 love affair with Rat Pack member Sammy Davis Jr.
The Kiss Me, Stupid star had a clandestine affair with the Black singer and actor at the height of their careers while Jim Crow segregation laws existed in America.
The new film marks Colman Domingo’s directorial debut, starring Sydney Sweeney as Novak and Alien: Romulus star David Jonsson as Davis.
“I don’t think the relationship was scandalous,” she said. “He’s somebody I really cared about. We had so much in common, including that need to be accepted for who we are and what we do, rather than how we look.”
She added that she was concerned the film was being made for “sexual reasons.”
Domingo has described the project as a “beautiful, sweet film that’s really about the possibility of love, but under many eyes.”
Kim Novak's Vertigo is now screening at the Venice Film Festival.
