#MeToo: ‘Vertigo’ star finds catharsis in painting
Artwork helps Novak, now 85, cope with memories of harassment
NEW YORK — Last fall, on her ranch in southern Oregon, Kim Novak found herself doing what she calls “my own Me Too painting.”
Novak, who turned 85 on Tuesday, had recently broken her left wrist — her painting hand — but was compelled enough to give it a try with her right. Seeing woman after woman come forward with their stories of harassment stoked Novak’s own recollections. She titled the result — a swirling, vibrantly colored abstraction of a menacing face looming above a woman — “A Time of Reckoning.”
“I never told these stories but my painting has it all,” said Novak, speaking by phone from her 240-acre ranch, where she lives with her husband Robert Malloy, a retired veterinarian. “It was very cathartic, I’m sure just like the gals of today found it cathartic to tell their story.”
“In that period, the same things went on. I never told these stories but my painting has it all. It was very cathartic, I’m sure just like the gals of today found it cathartic to tell their story.”
Novak recently granted her first interview in several years to mark the 60th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterwork, “Vertigo.” On Sunday, as part of the TCM Big Screen Classics series, “Vertigo” will be back in theaters, with an encore on Wednesday, March 21.
The initial reviews for “Vertigo” were tepid. The box office was disappointing. But “Vertigo” has steadily grown in reputation over the years to become one of the most widely acknowledged masterpieces in film. In 2012, it even displaced “Citizen Kane” as the top film on the Sight & Sound critics’ poll.
And with the film’s rise, Novak’s performance, alongside Jimmy Stewart, has similarly surged in stature. Film critic David Thomson has called it “one of the major female performances in the cinema.”
Novak’s performance in “Vertigo” is exceptional not only because it’s two-fold — she plays both the mysterious, suicidal Madeleine and Judy, whose similar appearance to Madeleine mystifies Scottie (Stewart), the obsessed detective who had trailed Madeleine before her apparent death — but because it’s so representative of how male fantasies are projected onto women. In Scottie’s elaborate efforts to recreate Judy as Madeleine, Novak recognized Hollywood’s own manipulations of her.