Actress Kim Novak is opening up about her childhood, growing up during the Great Depression to a mother that, she says, nearly killed her twice.
“The Depression caused so much hardship,” Novak, 92, said in the new documentary, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, per 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.”
Novak said she remembers “fighting to breathe, to stay alive, and I won,” she continued. “I stayed alive. I made it through.”
The film, directed by Alexandre O. Philippe and now screening at the Venice Film Festival, chronicles the Vertigo actress’ early life and on-screen career, which spanned from 1954 to 1991.
Despite her difficult upbringing, Novak maintained a relationship with both her parents, Joseph and Blanche, and even looks back fondly on her childhood.
“I so often think of my childhood as not being a good healthy childhood, but it was, you know,” Novak said, according to People. “There were beautiful things. My father was a very strict man and difficult.”
She continued, “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. 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.”
In addition to screening the documentary, the Venice Film Festival is also honoring Novak with a lifetime achievement award.
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“It’s incredible to feel appreciated and to receive this gift before the end of my life,” she told The Guardian in an interview published Saturday, August 30. “I think I’m being honored as much for being authentic as for my acting. It has sort of come full circle.”
The actress also weighed in on the upcoming biopic, Scandalous!, that will star Sydney Sweeney as Novak and David Jonsson as Sammy Davis Jr. The film will show the real-life story of the couple’s 1950s love affair. Novak said she was worried that, true to the title, the movie will concentrate too much on the sexual nature of their relationship.
“He’s somebody I really cared about,” she said of Davis, who died in 1990 at age 64. “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. But I’m concerned they’re going to make it all sexual reasons.”
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