The Other McCain

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Kim Novak’s Oscar Appearance Sparks Remarks About Age, Plastic Surgery

Posted on | March 3, 2014 | 20 Comments

People say disrespectful things on Twitter every day, but when 81-year-old Kim Novak showed up on Sunday’s Oscar broadcast to present the Best Animated Feature award to Frozen, the sarcasm about Novak’s surgically altered face was cruel: “Harsh critics took to social media to analyze her possible overuse of anti-aging interventions.”

This was unfortunate because (a) Kim Novak is a recent breast cancer survivor, and (b) Novak was one of Hollywood’s legendary beauties of the 1950s and ’60s.

For younger readers who don’t remember, there was time when Kim Novak’s name was mentioned along with Marilyn Monroe’s as the most desirable of movie stars. She twice starred with Frank Sinatra, in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Pal Joey (1957). While her film career was uneven — she never matched the sensation she caused starring opposite Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) — Novak continued to be a sought-after leading lady, cast in starring roles in the film adaptations of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1964) and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1965). According to People magazine, Novak “gave up the Hollywood limelight for a quiet life on a 240-acre ranch in Oregon with her veterinarian husband Bob Malloy, whom she married in 1976.”

As unfortunate as her most recent plastic surgery may have been, it was wrong of the Oscar producers to make Kim Novak an object of ridicule, deliberately creating a cruel visual pun by having her announce the Academy Award to Frozen.

Don’t tell me that was unintentional, assholes.

 


Comments

20 Responses to “Kim Novak’s Oscar Appearance Sparks Remarks About Age, Plastic Surgery”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 11:32 am

    For example, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) affects sexual development before birth and during puberty. Newborns are genetically male with both XY chromosomes however as the body develops it is unable to respond to androgens and as a result the individual has mostly female characteristics. Urban legend alleges that the actress Jamie Lee Curtis was born with AIS as well as Kim Novak.

    http://spinellimd.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/male-female-or-intersexed/

    H8ers!

  2. SPQR9
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 12:30 pm

    Hollywood is a vicious place populated by talentless hacks who have nothing better to do that attack people for their looks.

  3. richard mcenroe
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 12:34 pm

    Today’s starlets can’t twerk fast enough to catch up to Kim Novak.

  4. model217
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 12:35 pm

    Though the irony is that a new generation is being born that will point and laugh at the current talentless hacks

  5. Pine Baroness
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 12:45 pm

    You can’t discuss Kim Novak’s films without mentioning Bell Book and Candle with Jimmy Stewart and Jack Lemmon. One of our faves!

  6. richard mcenroe
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 12:50 pm

    Adapted from Fritz Leiber’s “Conjure Wife” wasn’t it?

  7. Zohydro
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 12:54 pm

    Taylor: Doctor, I’d like to kiss you good-bye…

    Zira: All right… But you’re so damned ugly!

  8. Adjoran
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 12:59 pm

    Amen! It was from the same period as Vertigo, too.

  9. Adjoran
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 1:01 pm

    I can’t pretend to follow Hollywood or the Oscars, but of what I saw, most of the sniping at Novak came from gay men. That’s just those I saw by accident or here or elsewhere reposted. But it did strike me as a pattern.

  10. Zohydro
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 1:15 pm

    Wrong Kim…

    I denounce myself!

  11. marew
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 1:24 pm

    81? Huh. No gripes but I’d love to see how a beauty like Kim would have aged naturally. Does anyone in Hollywood do that anymore…gracefully that is.

  12. DaveO
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 2:49 pm

    So the Custodians of a culture that worships youth, even to the sexualization of babies and pre-pubescent children, are upset that a woman spent her money on methods to look young? Hollywood Hypocrisy on display. It’s her money, her body alone, and her choice to make. Most of those starlets are praying the chemicals and surgical techniques improve when it comes their turn.

  13. Zohydro
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 3:42 pm

    Betty White? Raquel Welch? Donatella Versace?

  14. Rosalie
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 4:05 pm

    I think they’d look a heck of a lot better even if they were wrinkled up. They all look the same after they have plastic surgery. It’s downright scary.

  15. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 4:50 pm

    Shirley Temple Black did. Philip Seymour Hoffman…not too much.

  16. Oscar Slam Dunk: Because Slavery or Something | Regular Right Guy
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 5:22 pm

    […] why is it conservatives are the only ones who are remembering Kim Novak for her stellar career […]

  17. Bob Belvedere
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 6:33 pm

    She had the sexiest back – her front and sides weren’t too shabby either.

  18. scallywag
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 6:37 pm

    What is it about Hollywood and the entertainment industry that forces such absurd approximations on women? And why oh can’t we all just accept our mortality for the sake of our immortality ….?

    http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2014/03/kim-novak-plastic-surgery-face-darling-thing-made-happy/

  19. Stogie Chomper
    March 3rd, 2014 @ 11:53 pm

    I live only eight miles from San Juan Bautista, where the tower scene from “Vertigo” was filmed. I found a picture of Alfred Hitchcock talking to Kim Novak just outside the door of the horse barn, where some of the scenes were shot. I put my wife in the exact same spot where Kim Novak stood and took her picture. The horse barn is filled with old buggies and carriages, that were horse drawn, in the 19th century. One of them has a sign denoting it as the carriage Kim Novak sat in, in one of the scenes from “Vertigo.” There is also the same fake gray horse that Jimmy Stewart stood beside in the film — it is now deteriorating and cracking, but it is still there.

    I know the folks who own Hitchcock’s old ranch in Aptos, where Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart had been overnight guests, as well as other stars like Tippi Hedrin and even Ingrid Bergman. Oh yes, and Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier. I met Hitchcock’s daughter Pat Hitchcock O’Connell there, who came for a visit, along with her daughter, Tere Carruba. The ranch was built by San Francisco attorney Bruce Cornwall, whose law firm was Cornwall, Coldwell and Banker. He sold the ranch to Hitchcock in 1940. My friend acquired it in 1979, shortly before Hitchcock’s death.

    Cornwall once built a miniature castle in the woods near the ranch house, for his son to play in. The ruins of it are still there. I stood under an eve in the pouring rain, talking to Hitchcock’s daughter about that castle, while she smoked a cigarette. She used to see it and remembered it. I remembered thinking how very cool it was to be there with her, chatting about the history of the place, standing under an eave in the midst of a downpour.

    The town square in San Juan Bautista is where the old adobe mission stands, and the old adobe church, where Jimmy Stewart chases Kim Novak, just before she climbs the stairs to the tower where she pretends to jump off. There is no tower there, but there used to be many years ago.

    My wife and I like to visit San Juan Bautista for dining and browsing in the shops there. However, I can never enter the quaint little town without thinking of “Vertigo.”

  20. actionsspeaklouder
    March 4th, 2014 @ 5:58 pm

    One of the sexiest scenes in film (IMO) is in the movie “Picnic” when Novak and William Holden were at the carousel swaying to the music and clicking their fingers to the music. They didn’t take their eyes off each other and were just swaying and swinging their hips to the music. It was very subtly erotic. Haven’t seen anything sexier since.