In the passenger seat of a topless mini Jeep, I’m clinging on for dear life as Kim Novak, star of Vertigo, chuckles with delight. We’re careening across her sprawling 240-acre ranch in southern Oregon in the open-roof 4x4, bounding off-road over hillocks, crashing through the rushing river that runs through her property and swerving to avoid a llama sitting in the road.

In 1965, Kim Novak left Hollywood. A venerated screen siren of the Fifties and Sixties, she was stung by bad parts and bad reviews, including the tepid response to her performance in Vertigo. Recently voted the greatest film of all time, back in 1958 Vertigo was widely regarded as a Hitchcock misfire. Less than a decade after starring in one of history’s most beloved films, Novak had had enough and said goodbye to Hollywood.

Novak, 79, lives on the ranch with her husband of 36 years, Dr Robert Malloy, a retired veterinarian. Not forgetting their five horses and the herd of llamas. “When Bob and I were dating, I had one llama, and whenever we’d walk around [the llama would] come and walk between us,” she says, her voice retaining its unmistakable husky tones. “So Bob said, ‘You’ve got to get rid of that thing!’ And I told him, ‘You’re bringing two kids into the relationship. I get to bring one llama.’ So he said, ‘All right, then we better get another one.’”

Though Kim Novak is now a woman of the outdoors, her “Hitchcock blonde” glamour is very much intact. With those long, golden tresses flowing down her shoulders, she is dressed in jeans, a loose embroidered blouse and large round purple-tinted glasses. She looks decades less than her age and carries herself, zipping around the ranch, with a vigour that would leave most 30 year-olds in her dust.

The ranch is a long way from Los Angeles and a lifetime away from her storied, stormy screen career – one often beset by scandals and quarrels with the critics of the day. But in the decades since Novak’s departure, the critical evaluation of her work has steadily risen until this summer, Vertigo – a film that entirely hinges on Novak’s complex character-within-a-character performance – controversially knocked Citizen Kane off its perch at the top of Sight & Sound’s list of all-time greats.

While Hollywood may be finally recognising Novak, the star is not giving much thought to Hollywood. After giving up acting, she made periodic returns for “comeback” roles, but the intervals between grew longer and longer. Today, she seems to have removed herself from the firmament entirely, with 21 years having passed since her last small part.

It’s easy to see why she didn’t go back. Novak’s ranch house looks out on to a row of active hummingbird feeders and wild green space just beyond. A gigantic stone fireplace dominates the living room, designed by Novak and made of river rocks; it has birds’ nests set in tiny inlets with the face of Novak’s guardian angel shaped out of the stones. Around the house, the wood walls are filled with Novak’s oil paintings. Floor-to-ceiling murals hang in her bedroom, ethereal scenes of people transforming into ­animals, animals into energy. “On Bob’s side of the bed this is his fantasy,” she shows me. “He’s a boy who brought in a fish. Here it becomes the elk he dreams about, the tail of the elk becomes a rein. On my side, there’s me nurturing my man, Bob, and he’s nurturing this bald eagle that we raised.”

Just off the bedroom, Novak’s studio is filled with easels and works in progress. While the talk about her film career seems of only passing interest to her, and at moments not even that, Novak lights up when discussing her art. She gleefully shows me her latest creations, including the poster to a local music festival that she painted. “Before I even have a cup of coffee I’m here barefoot, just putting on a few strokes. I want to look at it with fresh eyes.” Reluctantly turning from the present to chat about the past, she confesses some amount of joy at the renewed interest in Vertigo, but says: “The only thing I felt bad about is that Jimmy Stewart and Hitch weren’t here to acknowledge it and feel the pride of it. And I wish that the composer [Bernard Herrmann] were here. It was a brilliant movie, but it’s a shame that it never got its recognition in its time.”

Settling in with a mug of coffee and gazing out at the woods, Novak recalls the low hopes with which she came to the project. After working for years at Columbia under the imperious studio boss Harry Cohn, she was lent out to Hitchcock and Paramount. “Cohn said to me, ‘I don’t think this is going to be a good movie, but Alfred Hitchcock’s a good director, so I’ll let you do it.’ I was happy to get away from Columbia for a while, because he was such a tyrant.”

She may be blasé about Hollywood, but as the lone surviving above-the-line member of the Vertigo team, Novak is fiercely protective of its legacy. On Hitchcock, and the reputation he has gathered over the years of being tough with his actors, she insists, “I didn’t find him controlling whatsoever. I found him a joy.” Perhaps. Working on the famous bell tower scene, Hitchcock directed Novak and her co-star Stewart to practise their lines and movements to a metronome, so the beats would be timed perfectly. “But on how to interpret the character, he gave us complete freedom and trust.”

As part of the PR campaign for Vertigo, Paramount leaked rumours of a feud on the set between Novak and Hitchcock, according to the book Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic by Dan Auiler. Over the years, this marketing mischief has gelled into a legend of a fraught relationship between a dictatorial director and a wilful star. Nothing, Novak insists, could be further from the truth. The seeds of the rumour, however, may stem from one discussion of Novak’s wardrobe for the character she played in the first half of the film, the remote and seductive Madeleine.

When Novak told Edith Head, the legendary costume designer working on the film, that she didn’t like the grey suit and black shoes she was slated to wear, thinking them too heavy and stiff for her character, Head let out a little chuckle. “Why don’t you go and discuss that with Mr Hitchcock?” Novak remembers her saying. So she scheduled a meeting with the director who beckoned her, “‘Sit down and tell me what it is you don’t like about them.’ And so I did, and he allowed me to go on about the suit. ‘It looks very regimented, it looks like something you have to walk very stiff in, almost like a military uniform. And the shoes, well I feel like I’d be uncomfortable wearing black shoes, because I’ve always felt black shoes make you feel grounded and I like to feel a part of the air, not part of the Earth.’

“He listened completely to everything I said and at the end of the discussion he said, ‘You will wear the grey suit, and you will wear the black shoes. Thank you for discussing it with me, but I am the director.’ And I said, ‘Thank you for listening to what I had to say and if that’s what you want I’ll find a way to make it work.’ And I left and started thinking about it. I thought, ‘He knows my point of view, he must see a reason why that would work. He wants me to feel that discomfort as Madeleine. And, of course, she should feel that way because she’s actually Judy, playing the part of somebody, so that edge of discomfort will help me.’”

Far from resenting the command, Novak recalls feeling touched that “he listened to me”, something she says directors and Hollywood moguls almost never did with a young actress back then. Novak learnt this the hard way.

Born Marilyn Pauline Novak, she fought with Harry Cohn when he wanted to change her name to Kit Marlowe because “nobody’s going to want to see a girl with a Polack name”. They ended up with Kim as a compromise. And in 1957, a controversy-averse Cohn asked her to end her budding romance with Sammy Davis Jnr; this time, there was no compromise.

Unlike, say, her fellow Hitchcock leading lady Tippi Hedren, Novak is keen to defend the director against lurid allegations that have circulated since his death. Hedren, whose collaboration with Hitchcock in The Birds is the subject of the BBC film The Girl, has accused the director of harassment, calling him “evil” and “deviant” and saying: “He ruined my career.” She claims that after she rejected his advances he became obsessed with her and, among other tortures, had her pecked at for days by live birds during the film’s shooting. Hedren’s daughter, the actress Melanie Griffith, has said that when she was a child, Hitchcock gave her a doll made up to look like her mother, in a tiny coffin.

“I feel bad about all the stuff people are saying about him now, that he was a weird character,” says Novak. “I did not find him to be weird at all. I never saw him make a pass at anybody or act strange to anybody. And wouldn’t you think if he was that way, I would’ve seen it or at least seen him with somebody? I think it’s unfortunate when someone’s no longer around and can’t defend themselves.”

Last year, Novak found herself at the centre of a kerfuffle when the Oscar-winning film The Artist lifted a piece of the Vertigo score for its own soundtrack. The artistic theft, she explained in a full-page advertisement in Variety, was tantamount to “rape”. “I feel as if my body or at least, my body of work, has been violated,” she wrote. Does she regret that choice of word? Not at all. “I said that because I had been raped as a child so I know what that feeling was like,” she says, referring to an attack that she didn’t tell anybody about at the time, and won’t elaborate on years later. “And that’s exactly the way it struck me. I said exactly what I felt.”

She also still carries the scars from the initial unkind reviews of Vertigo. Even after the publicity campaign, The New Yorker’s verdict was particularly damning: “Alfred Hitchcock, who produced and directed this thing, has never before indulged in such far-fetched nonsense.” Novak’s remote, complex performance seemed to go over the heads of many critics, who never quite got her cool, cerebral style.

“Those things hurt,” she says. “I always have been vulnerable and I always wanted to stay vulnerable because that’s what makes you enjoy life too. If you give that up you give up being open to the joy and beauty of life. So I choose not to make my skin thick. If I could go back now I would probably not read the reviews. But it’s hard not to because you want to improve. You feel like, well, they must know. Unfortunately, they don’t always know. History has proven they’re not right necessarily.”

After Cohn’s death and the loss of his expert eye, the parts got worse. Forgettable, salacious films like Boys’ Night Out and The Notorious Landlady became her bread and butter and Novak withdrew from acting. “I might’ve stayed around and said, ‘I’m going to find a good vehicle for myself.’ But I’m not that kind of person. I’m all about expressing myself [although] I don’t really care what happens after I do. So when they suddenly started finding only sex-symbol roles, rather than say, ‘I’m going to fight for something,’ I left. I just walked away.”

She retreated to a series of idyllic spots up the coast from Hollywood. Did she miss the limelight? She dismisses the notion out of hand. “I took off to Big Sur, which is the most beautiful place in the world. Every place I’ve been has been more beautiful than Hollywood. I lived on the ocean, with whales going in front of my house all the time. Stardom is all about rhinestones. My life there was about moonshine and real stars sparkling on you. How could you compare the two? I went to the real thing.”

As she withdrew, she began to paint. Art had been her first love. Novak was an art student in Chicago when she began modelling, taking the first steps down the path that eventually led to Hollywood; Cohn’s scouts first spotted her as the winner of a “Miss Deepfreeze” beauty contest.

Novak has long struggled with bipolar disorder but admits she veers more towards “manic” than “depressive”’. This is where the painting comes in. She will often leap out of bed in the middle of the night to paint, and it is the first thing she does every single morning. “Because it’s pure. It’s heart and soul and guts. It’s all me that comes out. When I’m painting I’ll stay up all night sometimes. And Bob will go nuts. He says, ‘Come to bed, this is obsession.’ But I’m obsessive compulsive. I pour all I have into my work. That’s who I am. I give everything I’ve got when I’m doing something that means something to me.”

Why does she surround herself with animals? “They know if I’m being honest and they’ll tell me if I’m being honest and that’s all that really matters. Especially goats. I don’t have any goats right now but a goat will tell you immediately. If they don’t think you’re being honest they’ll butt you. Llamas will spit at you. Or let you touch them if you’re being honest. They’ll rub up against you. And that’s such a rewarding thing and that to me is worth everything.”

Despite her mixed feelings about Hollywood, Novak summons up one memory that still touches her, on almost llama-worthy level. She tells of a quiet moment with Jimmy Stewart on the set of Bell, Book and Candle, the film they made together immediately after Vertigo. “It was,” she says softly, her husky voice catching a bit, “probably the most honest, beautiful time of an animal instinct I’ve known. I was sitting with Jimmy Stewart when they called for lunch and they turned off the set lights. Everyone left. We were playing a scene where we had our shoes off. And we just sat there on the set, put up our feet, bare feet, and we sat there the whole lunch break together with our feet up and next to each other, not saying a single word. Our feet just occasionally touched each other. It was one of those animal times like when an animal lets you rub its neck. It was the most intimate, rewarding time with another human being I’ve ever known. Feet don’t lie.”

The last time she saw Stewart was when they bumped into each other at an airport. “I said, ‘Jimmy, I wish we could do a movie together.’ And he said, ‘I can’t be a leading man anymore. I don’t want to make movies anymore.’ He’d been away from movies for a while. He said, ‘You know, I walk out my back yard and I can’t remember sometimes why I walk out there.’ I said, ‘I understand that, it happens.’ He said, ‘Yep. Happens. [Pause.] Sure is good seeing you again.’ And I said, ‘You too, Jimmy.’ And gave him a hug.”

Despite these memories, Novak brushes aside any questions about one more return. When asked if she will come back, she just shrugs, “Naw, not really.” Just one more? She laughs, and talks about her life in the country, painting, riding her horse every day. And she compares it to her last role in 1991, when she took a small part in Liebestraum, a film by the director Mike Figgis, and found, once again, another director reluctant to discuss and engage in the process with her. “I said, ‘Ah, same old Hollywood. I don’t need this.’”

And with that, we’re back off-roading, stopping to pick just-ripe blackberries, admiring a bridge that Bob built, driving to an island on their property that sits between two branches of the river and finally stopping to look at the camping spot the couple built. It has a little cabin, with a picnic area and hammocks hanging over the rapids of the river just below. Miles from the nearest highway, it is as close to an image of Eden as one could imagine. Taking it in, Novak looks around and says: “Not bad, eh?”

Alone among her generation, she is one of the last of the greats not to have written a memoir. Years ago, she started one, but the notes were destroyed in a fire and she never returned to it. Riding back at breakneck speed down the river path, I press her. Why not get all her great stories down now? Shouting over the engine and the brush thrashing beneath us, she just laughs. “You can talk about life,” Novak shouts. “Or you can live it.”

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