American actress who debuted in the 1954 film “Pushover.” Her film credits include “Bell, Book, and Candle,” 1959, “The Man With the Golden Arm,” 1955 and “Vertigo,” 1958. She has also done some TV. She won a beauty contest at age 20, and 50 years later is still considered one of the world’s classically beautiful women.
Born Marilyn Pauline, her dad, Joseph worked for the Chicago-Milwaukee Railroad and came from a family of farmers who believed in hard physical work. He was very remote, private and a loner who never talked about his feelings. She wanted her father’s approval more than anything and worked so hard to get it, but never succeeded. “I always had to prove my worth,” she said. Her parents were strong disciplinarians, Catholic and very Old Country. She and her older sister were raised in a tough, working-class district of Chicago where she was a shy, often frightened child with few friends. Unusually tall and thin for her age, she used to lock herself in her room. When she was 11, a doctor urged her mom, Blanche, to have her meet children her own age. At her mom’s insistence, she joined the Fair Teens Club, a Chicago meeting place for youngsters. The lady in charge talked her into modeling in one of its fashion shows. Through the club modeling she won a scholarship to modeling school. After high school she attended three semesters at college, modeling part-time. Her mom died in 1983 and her dad in 1987.
In 1953, after winning a beauty contest, a refrigerator company hired her to travel nationally as “Miss Deepfreeze.” The job took her to Hollywood where she screen-tested for Columbia Pictures and caught the eye of Harry Cohn, Columbia’s ruthless chief. He changed her name to Kim, her hair from brunette to platinum blond and seemingly overnight., with no acting experience, a star was born. From the first, she worked with a lot of powerful men in Hollywood – Harry Cohn, Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock, among others. When her first picture, “Pushover” with Fred MacMurray came out in 1954 her mom said her dad walked out of the theater and wouldn’t watch. He wouldn’t see any of her films. She appeared with Frank Sinatra in 1955’s “The Man with the Golden Arm.” With her rise to stardom coming so quickly, she was named the most popular star in the world in 1956, only two years after the release of her first movie.
In December 1957 a scandal erupted that she and Sammy Davis Jr. were having an affair. Harry Cohn, on hearing the news, flew back to Hollywood and en route suffered two mild heart attacks. Within days the scandal was all over the papers. A top Chicago columnist, Irv Kupcinet, scoured court records hoping to unearth a marriage license. In 1985 he claimed he did find a license. Shortly after the scandal broke, Davis was suddenly married to an acquaintance, Loray White, a black chorus girl, in a makeshift ceremony in Las Vegas, NV. Seven weeks later, Davis separated from Loray. Years later it was discovered that Harry Cohn used highly placed mob connections to force a breakup between Novak and Davis. Not long afterwards, Cohn suffered a third and fatal heart attack after becoming upset after reading a bundle of new clippings about the affair.
The more popular Novak became, the unhappier she grew. “I was sinking. All I wanted was for them to tell me that I was doing something right or let me find some way that I could be good.” The studio felt they’d created her and controlled her private and public lives, what she wore, how her hair was done, and the men with whom she was seen. Eventually she felt she was losing herself. In 1966 she abruptly left Hollywood, leaving behind a meteoric career that had made her the top box-office star in the world. For a time she lived by Monterey Bay, then on a ranch in the mountains near Carmel. “I made nature my parents, my teachers. People couldn’t be my teachers because they would be influenced by who I was. So my teachers became the animals, the plants, the sea.” In the ’80s she returned to show business, making an occasional film or TV appearance. She worked for a season on the series “Falcon Crest” and appeared in the film “The Mirror Crack’d,” 1980. In the fall of 1989 she completed Edith Wharton’s “The Children” co-staring Ben Kingsley.
On 3/15/1965 she abruptly married the British actor Richard Johnson, who had played opposite her in “Moll Flanders.” The marriage brought her disillusionment and resulted in divorce after only a year. Romantically she’s been linked to Aly Khan, Rafael Trujillo Jr., Frank Sinatra and others. In 1974 she met seven-year younger veterinarian Robert Malloy, whom she had called to help with one of her ailing horses. He didn’t know who she was because he’d been in vet school working so hard that he never went to movies. They were married on 3/12/1976 and moved to a 240-acre ranch in the Oregon Cascades in 1978 where they have a menagerie of dogs, cats and llamas, the latter of which they breed.
On 7/24/2000, her one-story house in Eagle Point, OR was destroyed by fire. Novak escaped the blaze unharmed but lost much of her movie memorabilia along with other valued personal possessions.
Link to Wikipedia biography