Eva Marie Saint: the Hitchcock muse whose career spanned nearly eight decades
The 1955 Oscar winner for ‘On the Waterfront’ and co-star of ‘North by Northwest’ was 102 when she passed away at her home in LA on Tuesday. Besides these famous roles, she played almost 100 characters throughout her lifetime and remained active until five years ago
Eva Marie Saint, one of the last great actresses from Alfred Hitchcock’s universe, died on Tuesday, October 6 at her home in Los Angeles, family representatives said. She was 102.
The actress won an Oscar in 1955 for her role the year before in the film On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan. But international stardom truly came with North by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1959, in which she played one of the director’s archetypal cool blond women, Eve Kendall, as a foil to Cary Grant.
Across her century-long life and a career that spanned nearly eight decades, Saint played almost 100 roles and remained active until a few years ago. Her most recent work, about five years ago, was in voice acting.
In 2018, at age 93, she showed up for an Academy Awards ceremony and said with a smile: “I’m older than the Academy.” And she was right: the institution was founded in 1927 and the first Oscars were handed out in 1929. She was born in July 1924. Hollywood will always remember her placing flowers on her own star, at 6730 Hollywood Boulevard.
Saint was one of the last remaining actresses from Hollywood’s golden era. There are still a few well-known names who are still around, such as Mel Brooks, Dick Van Dyke and Tippi Hedren, another Hitchcock muse who starred in The Birds and who turned 96 in January of this year, although she has not made any public appearances in nearly a decade.
Born in New Jersey, she acquired a taste for acting through college plays, back when she was studying in Ohio. She began her acting career in the mid-1940s, at age 20, getting small parts in ads, then short movies, TV series and TV movies. After studying at the prestigious Actor’s Studio in New York, she gained some fame between 1950 and 1952 for the series One Man’s Family, where she showed up in a dozen episodes. Saint became a familiar face and the job gave her money, even if she didn’t like it too much. But her fame really started to grow when she played Sheila Dixon in the series Martin Kane, Private Eye.
Her role as Edie in On The Waterfront earned her popular support and critical acclaim. The movie earned eight Academy Awards, including for best movie, director and actor for Marlon Brando. Saint also earned her first nomination and win - the only ones of her career. When she picked up the Oscar she was nine months pregnant and told the audience that the excitement might make her go into labor at any moment. As a matter of fact, she gave birth two days later.
Global fame came to her around five years later with her role as the cold Eve Kendall in North by Northwest. As she herself said in 2000 during a visit to the San Sebastián Film Festival, Hitchcock gave her three pieces of advice to get into the role: “First, lower your voice; second, don’t use your hands; and third and most important, always look deep into Cary Grant’s eyes. The last part was easy.”
Queen of drama
Besides that role, which people always identified her with, Saint had a long a fruitful career that largely focused on dramatic work. She worked with other Hollywood greats: with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in Raintree County (1957); alongside Paul Newman in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), again with Taylor and Richard Burton in The Sandpiper (1965), by Vincente Minelli, and with Gregory Peck in The Stalking Moon (1968).
In 1966 she showed off her comic vein with The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! together with Carl Reiner and Alan Arkin. SHe herself said she never wanted to be a superstar and would rather acept smaller roles that allowed her more time to raise her children. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1990, she said that as she got older, there were fewer roles for her in the big screen, which was why she switched to television and felt “perfectly happy.” In the 1980s she made a few appearances in series such as Moonlighting, where she played the mother of Cybill Shepherd, and in 1990 her work as a cold widow in the TV movie People Like Us earned her an Emmy. And in 2006 her popularity grew again thanks to Superman Returns.
In 1956, Saint married director and producer Jeffrey Hayden. They were together for over 50 years until the latter’s death in December 2016, at age 90. They had two children, Darrell and Laurette, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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