Kim Novak emerges to celebrate her 90th birthday and talk about Pamela Anderson
In a rare interview, Kim Novak praises Pamela Anderson's recent documentary
In celebration of her 90th birthday, Novak sat down for a rare interview for People, taking a reprieve from horseback riding and painting. While she says she has not watched a lot of new movies, one notable recent watch is Pamela: A Love Story.
“When you’re inside of the person who someone is looking at, you’re not looking from their perspective,” Novak says. “They may see you as a sex symbol, but that’s not how you see yourself, and that’s what was beautiful about Pamela’s documentary. She was showing us the person she was growing up and who she was through these relationships, not of how it looked to other people, but from the perspective of how it felt to her.”
Novak is no stranger to the pressures of maintaining a sexualized image for a career in Hollywood. Upon her entry into the industry at the age of 20, Novak was used by studio executives to rival other on-screen bombshells of the time, such as Marilyn Monroe. Touted as the Lavender Blonde, she would eventually become a powerful box office lure, starring in Vertigo, Picnic, Pal Joey, as well as Bell, Book And Candle.
“I mean, in so many of my performances, I think they were expecting to see the sex symbol, and instead I gave them just the raw me,” she says of her career.