Eva Marie Saint

Although her resumé might suggest otherwise, she has claimed she was never a workaholic and that she had interests far more important away from the movie business.  To her immense credit, one of those interests was her family which took second to nothing.  She clung tightly to her 65-year marriage and a son and daughter who meant everything to her.  She turned down roles that would have separated her from them and yet she made her mark in a town with far more ambitious people.

Eva Marie Saint's list of leading men is astonishing... Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Cary Grant, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck, James Mason and James Garner.  She worked with such esteemed directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Edward Dmytryk, Vincente Minnelli, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann and John Frankenheimer.  She won an Oscar for her first movie, landing her in a small but elite company.

I thought very highly of most of her early films, some of which were blockbusters.  She is one of those who started her movie career as a star and yet it never seemed to go to her head.  She was always pretty much a lady and a strong one who oozed charm.  Moreover, everyone seemed to like her.  She was down-to-earth and it was impossible to catch her acting.   Her presence in a film meant that I went to see it.

Saint was born on Independence Day in 1924 in Newark, New Jersey.  She had an older sister and appears to have had a happy but unremarkable life as a child and teenager.  She always thought she would become a teacher but began studying acting while at Bowling Green State University in 1946.  She started her career as a radio actress in Manhattan and by 1948 she was attending the famed Actors Studio.  For five years or so she appeared in a number of prestigious TV shows.

In 1951 she married future television producer and director Jeffrey Hayden, the love of her life.  While they would have their share of Hollywood friends and occasionally did the party circuit, they largely led a private life

In 1953 she not only appeared in the television version of A Trip to Bountiful but also on Broadway in the same year.  Her mentor Lillian Gish also appeared with her in both versions.

Director Elia Kazan saw her in that Broadway production and hired her over a number of other actresses vying for the role of the convent-educated Edie Doyle in 1954's On the Waterfront.  She played the sister of a dockworker whose murder sets the story in motion.  She played the love interest of Marlon Brando's character, a heady beginning for a first-time movie actress. 

Despite the heavy subject matter of the film, Saint has said it was a very happy set (at least for her).  Her Actors Studio roots were also shared by Kazan, Brando and Karl Malden, allowing her to feel right at home.  Two more acting heavyweights, Lee J. Cobb and Rod Steiger, were also in the cast.  It was a heady experience for a neophyte movie actress who would win an Oscar for best supporting actress.  

That's kind of funny.  Supporting actress generally means one who supports another actress with higher billing or one whose role is considered small.  Neither was the case here but Columbia Pictures entered her name in the supporting category which seemed to guarantee a win.  She was very pregnant on the night of the ceremonies and gave birth to her son two days later.

On the strength of Waterfront she was hired to play the pregnant wife of a junkie in the harrowing production of A Hatful of Rain (1957).  Its grim depiction of morphine addiction in a family in a New York tenement doesn't make for light entertainment.  It has been lauded as being medically and sociologically accurate.  Saint, Don Murray, Tony Franciosa, Lloyd Nolan and Henry Silva are nothing less than superb.

Raintree County (1957) was a lavish roadshow production about the Civil War which MGM envisioned as a worthy successor to their Gone with the Wind.  It didn't quite work out that way but of course I was mesmerized at the time.  Montgomery Clift stars as an idealistic schoolteacher who loves Saint but marries Elizabeth Taylor after he impregnates her.  In addition to dealing with the troubling war, the film concerns itself with mental illness.

Filming was problematic.  This was the film that was in the middle of production when Clift had his famous automobile accident.  He was frequently drunk, on painkillers and other drugs and often incoherent.  Saint, ever the saint, found him shy and remote although she liked him.  She was even more fond of Taylor and was happy to work with her a few years later in the insipid The Sandpiper.

Her best role and most famous movie is without a doubt North by Northwest (1959).  Hitchcock cast her against type, turning her into a glamorous femme fatale.  Hollywood was surprised at her casting.  He had her long blonde hair cut and asked her lower her voice to more closely fit with his idea of a beautiful spy who falls in love with her quarry. 

Not that their relationship was anything other than pleasant, but she was not prepared to have a director who didn't talk to her about her acting or motivation.  All he seemed interested in was how she looked and he even picked out the wardrobe she would wear.   

So Eva Marie Saint, lover of home and hearth above all else, would join the ever-expanding club of Hitchcock blondes.  She could never reach that top rung that Grace Kelly had been perched on but he likely found Saint far easier to work with than Doris Day, Vera Miles and Kim Novak. 

Oh, have I forgotten Cary Grant?  As if...  Many years later Saint would continue to remember him fondly.  Their relationship, though fraught with peril on the screen, was a joy for her.  She found him kind, gracious, totally prepared and the most elegant man she ever worked with.  This being his fourth and final film with Hitchcock, he helped her over the rough edges with the director.

I absolutely loved the dialogue in this movie.  The seductive, cat and mouse games Saint and Grant play are bewitching.  They have so many opportunities to bring sparkle to audiences but my favorite scene between them is probably in the dining car on the train.  Obviously this film (ranked #24 on AFI's all-time greatest films list) is brightened even further by James Mason's villainy and Jessie Royce Landis's madcap mama. 

Saint would never have agreed to spend months filming Exodus (1960) in Israel were it not for the fact that her family traveled with her.  While the ogre director Otto Preminger was never easy to work with and he was particularly testy on this mammoth production of Leon Uris' famous novel, he was kind to Saint and she enjoyed working with him. 

Her role as a nurse is a large and impressive one and her scenes with young Jill Haworth are so touching. Saint also loved working with Paul Newman whom she not only knew from the Actors Studio but had done a television version of Our Town with him and Frank Sinatra in 1955.

John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down (1962) was another departure for Saint in that she plays a tragic character who is emotionally fragile and has made some bad choices.  She was given top billing in a cast that includes Warren Beatty, her old buddy Malden, Angela Lansbury and Brandon deWilde.  It's the story of a couple who bicker endlessly about their wastrel older son which is upped when an older female family friend comes to stay with them for awhile and becomes involved with the son.

This is a cast that I dearly loved... watching them all perform together was like being in an acting class.  The screenplay was adapted by one of my favorite writers, William Inge, and feels a great deal like something written by his buddy, Tennessee Williams.  Tonally, I always found it remarkably similar to Splendor in the Grass which Inge had also written just the year before.

Saint's next two films would costar a buddy of hers, James Garner.  I much preferred the first of those pictures, 36 Hours (1964), a most unusual war thriller.  Garner is an American major kidnapped by the Germans and taken to a hospital where they drug him and convince him it's a later time and that the war is over so that they can get him to reveal secrets.  There was not a great deal for Saint to do as a dispassionate nurse although, of course, she handled it all with her usual aplomb.

Doesn't she looks like a relative of Jessica Chastain's?

Grand Prix (1966) was another one of those huge roadshow, large-screen productions, this time about Formula One race car drivers.  It had a host of international actors and drivers to brighten its allure.  Saint plays one of the women involved in the story's shenanigans off the course.  It required little of her but the movie was a big hit with audiences.

So was The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming that same year.  Saint had only made the rare comedy and this one clearly qualified as zany.  It concerns a Russian submarine that gets grounded off the coast of a small New England village and the havoc that ensues.  The time is the Cold War which adds to the mayhem.  Though second-billed, again she has little to do other than laugh at the antics of the film's numerous comics.  I haven't seen it since its opening and have just been wondering how it holds up.

I have already written of The Stalking Moon (1968) which is the only big-screen western Saint has done and one of my favorite westerns of all-time.  Besides, I've never missed a Gregory Peck flick.

Saint got some of the best notices of her career for Loving (1970) although the film really belongs to George Segal as her cheating spouse, an illustrator having, yes, a midlife crisis.  I think it had some important things to say.  The critics may have liked it more than the public.

Around this time, Saint said she was offered too many roles that didn't appeal to her so she returned to television with a vengeance, starring in one TV movie after another for 30 years, several to much acclaim.  In 1990 she won an Emmy for the miniseries People Like Us.  If the movies missed her, she didn't appear to feel the same.

By the time she returned to movies, she was 74 years old and leading lady days were behind her.  I loved I Dreamed of Africa (2000), a true story, similar to Out of Africa.  She was most effective as Kim Basinger's mother.  Five years later she was a kind but eccentric librarian in the family pooch film Because of Winn-Dixie and the same year had a small role in the road movie Don't Come Knocking as Sam Shepard's mother.  She had a small role as Clark Kent's adoptive mother in Superman Returns (2006).

In 2012 she did a charming interview with her buddy Robert Osborne on TCM.  She did not work at all for eight years and then returned in a small but central role in the fantasy drama Winter's Tale (2014) opposite Colin Farrell.  Thus far it stands as her last big-screen movie.

On Christmas Eve 2016 her beloved Jeffrey died ending 65 years of togetherness.  Clearly it was one of Hollywood's sturdiest marriages with nary a hint of publicized drama along the way.  Today she still lives in their Santa Monica home at age 94.

"Romeo and Juliet" Hayden

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