Kim Novak trips down memory lane at In Love with the Stars gallery

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In one of the many now-famous scenes in Alfred Hitchcock's famously haunting psychological thriller Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart spots Kim Novak across a restaurant room wallpapered in vermilion silk, and the camera tracks closer to her bare shoulder, swathed in green taffeta.

Today, nearly 60 years later, Novak, 82, is seated at another table. I first spot her across a similar red room – the dark gallery of In Love with the Stars, a new Toronto exhibition that showcases a selection of fan scrapbooker Edith Nadajewski's collection, in the Film Reference Library of the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Actually, I hear the peals of Novak's husky laughter before I spot her poring over the Nadajewski scrapbooks and regaling curator Sylvia Frank with stories while a photographer hovers and snaps. In place of Vertigo's famous spiral chignon is a fluffy, tousled honey-blond bob, and she wears a painterly tunic in watercolour shades of ochre draped over a black top and trousers. "This is such a fun, special thing," she tells Frank, delighted at the off-the-record trip down memory lane. "I'm thrilled to have seen them."

Novak reaches out a white-gloved hand to mine – it's an effusive greeting, and robust – and I don a similar set of cotton conservator's gloves as we settle in to chat while she turns the last pages of nine scrapbooks Nadajewski devoted to her.

Elizabeth Taylor was still a work in progress when Nadajewski died in 2007 at the age of 87 – Taylor's scrapbooks number 36 to Novak's nine, reflecting Novak's shorter stint in Hollywood. After reaching the height of fame, in 1965 Novak left the company town behind, save for sporadic later parts, to get back to her original love, art ("that's the thing I'm most proud of in my life"). She headed north, first to Big Sur, Calif., then to the Sams Valley in Oregon, where she lives on a ranch with horses, a herd of llamas and Dr. Robert Malloy, her husband of nearly 40 years.

Does she still get fan mail? "Oh God, I get so much," she groans good-naturedly. "Boxes of it in my house." Just a few days before her Toronto visit, Novak posted a Facebook page message informing fans that she would not be accepting any more fan mail, period. "It was very hard," she explains of the decision to devote her time to her art, family and friends, "and the reason I have to finish what's there is that unfortunately they send you posters where a lot of them have been signed by other people, and you can't not do that!"

The story of Kim Novak goes something like this: Former Art Institute of Chicago student from suburban Chicago is discovered in 1954, signed to Columbia and plays roles from Madge in Picnic to Somerset Maugham's Mildred in Of Human Bondage to Moll Flanders – but is eventually made indelible as an icy Hitchcock blonde. There is none of that froideur here – the chatter in between bites from a bowl of enormous green grapes (evidently an archival-safe snack) is voluble and unfiltered. Some of the scrapbook photos are publicity shots and movie stills, others are from fan magazines. One moment I don't catch at the time but my interview recording picks up and I hear later is of Novak sighing and whispering to herself, "Oh God, Trujillo!" with a fond chuckle, over what must have been a photo of her with long-ago beau Ramfis Trujillo (notorious Hollywood playboy and son of the Caribbean dictator).

A page settles on a 1950s publicity photo of Novak draped in a mauve dress and scarf on a mauve backdrop. There's that lavender again, I joke – a reference to the Columbia publicity department touting her as not merely another platinum blonde but "The Lavender Blonde" – her locks were rinsed with a lavender tint and fan magazines gushed, on cue, that it was her favourite colour.

"Suddenly they were selling pieces of sheets that were supposedly from my lavender room," she remembers. "It's like they wanted me to hate it; it was made into such a phony thing!" I mention that it must be back in her good graces, since I've seen it in her pastels and portraits – including her recent mural that riffs on Vertigo themes.

"It's in a lot of my art," she continues. "I paint a lot with purple and lavender. But on the other hand, you get to resent something when it's imposed," she says. We're talking about hues, but we could be talking about the whole celebrity publicity factory.

As critic David Thomson writes of her acting in his biographical study, "Vertigo, Hitchcock's masterpiece, owes some of its power to Novak's harrowing suspension between tranquility and anxiety." A few years ago, Novak revealed that during her Hollywood heyday she suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. I ask about this in regard to her most famous role, Vertigo's dual Judy and alter-ego Madeleine, Scottie's fantasy object of desire.

"I think I brought a tremendous amount to the role. I know I did," Novak nods. "I wasn't a fool just being there. I know a lot of people think, oh, she just happened to fall into that," and she elaborates about how Hitchcock wasn't a director interested in actor motivations or method. "He was strictly concerned about the stand here, do that, da da da. He separated completely all the external things and allowed you to go wherever you wanted to in your head. It was wonderful to be able to have that time to know what I could use and what I couldn't – for me it was a total godsend. And I used it all."

She says recent film depictions of Hitchcock are not of the man she knew: "I never saw any signs whatsoever of that, of any voyeur-type character." But she did endure unpleasant experiences with Columbia, where the studio boss changed her look, attempted to control her personal life (breaking up her romance with Sammy Davis Jr.) and tried to change her Czech last name (she refused to compromise, and later winked at the experience by giving the rejected stage name Kit Marlowe to her Falcon Crest TV character).

"I used the whole Harry Cohn thing, completely, in the Madeleine," she says, referring to the notorious Columbia studio chief. "My experiences with Harry Cohn and the whole thing of being made over, the whole Hollywood studio system – it was so much, too much, and so right for the part." Another thing that was right for the role was being moulded into Madeleine's painfully constricting, uncomfortable costumes by Edith Head. "It made it work for the character even better, the awkwardness of it."

In a few minutes, she will be whisked to Roy Thomson Hall to introduce the Toronto International Film Festival's special screening of the 1958 film, featuring a live Toronto Symphony Orchestra performance of Bernard Herrmann's score. As she gets ready to leave, she remarks. "I loved Hollywood, actually. I learned a lot from the fantasy world," she adds. "It's influenced me a lot in my painting. Although I have a very keen imagination and Hollywood intensified it. I am grateful for what it's given me. Including perspective – now that I've been away from it long enough that I can appreciate it!" We turn the last page, and she's off.

In Love with the Stars runs at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto through April 2, 2016 (tiff.net).