Eva Marie Saint, one of the last great ladies of classic Hollywood, has died. He was 102 years old. Oscar winner for On the Waterfront and unforgettable Eve Kendall in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, the actress passed away on Tuesday 6 October at her home in Los Angeles of natural causes, surrounded by her family. The news was announced by his representative Jeff Sanderson.
Between the port of Hoboken and Mount Rushmore there is almost an entire atlas of American cinema. Eva Marie Saint went through it without ever completely belonging to the star system, with that luminous beauty that always seemed to keep a secret and a way of acting capable of transforming fragility into strength. She was the girl who pushed Marlon Brando not to lower his eyes in the face of guilt. And a few years later the woman who, on a train headed towards the mystery, made Cary Grant lose much more than his bearings.
Two films would have been enough to consign her to the history of cinema. But his career tells much more
The Oscar for the first film with On the Waterfront
Cinema came after radio, television, theater and the Actors Studio. When Elia Kazan chose Eva Marie Saint to play Edie Doyle in On the Waterfront in 1954, it was her big screen debut.
Alongside him was Marlon Brando, in the role of former boxer Terry Malloy, a longshoreman trapped between silence, violence and conscience. Edie is the sister of a man murdered because he intended to testify against the corrupt syndicate that controls the port. She could just be the good girl called to redeem the hero. Saint instead makes it something more complex: a stubborn and vulnerable presence, a sweetness that never coincides with weakness.
The result was one of the most dazzling debuts in Hollywood history. On the Waterfront won eight Oscars, including those for best film and for Marlon Brando, while Eva Marie Saint won the statuette for best supporting actress.
She was pregnant with her first child. During the ceremony he even joked about the possibility that the baby could be born there. Darrell would come into the world two days later.
Hollywood had found a new star. Eva Marie Saint, on the other hand, had already decided that she would not leave it to Hollywood to choose who she should become.
International intrigue, Eva Marie Saint becomes a Hitchcock star
If Kazan had sensed its dramatic power, Alfred Hitchcock understood its mystery.
In 1959 he wanted her alongside Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Saint became Eve Kendall: elegant, seductive, ambiguous, perhaps in love, perhaps a traitor, certainly a woman forced to hide more than she can afford to tell.
She is one of the most memorable female figures in Hitchcock's cinema.
The director personally intervened on the external construction of the character. He worked on Saint's clothes, hair, makeup and tone of voice, asking her to make him lower and more controlled. But just beneath that flawless surface the actress let something continually unstable seep through.
Eve Kendall seduces because we never fully know which side of the screen she's looking at.
With Cary Grant he forms one of the most sensual couples in Hitchcockian cinema: he is chased by an identity that does not belong to him, she is forced to play too many of them. Desire becomes suspicion, betrayal becomes a loving possibility, lies become a tool for survival.
And then of course there is Mount Rushmore. The hands that try not to let go, the precipice, Hitchcock who manages to transform even the fear of falling into a form of courtship
From Elizabeth Taylor to Paul Newman, the great films of Eva Marie Saint
Between the 1950s and 1960s Eva Marie Saint worked with some of the most important names in Hollywood of the time.
In 1957 he starred with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in The Tree of Life and was the protagonist of A Hatful of Rain by Fred Zinnemann, an intense drama about drug addiction.
In 1960 Otto Preminger's Exodus arrived, alongside Paul Newman. Films starring Warren Beatty, James Garner, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck and Elizabeth Taylor followed. Among the titles in his filmography are Castles of Sand, The Last 36 Hours, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming and Grand Prix.
Yet Saint never turned success into professional bulimia.
She refused contracts that could have tied her to the studios and chose several times to move away from cinema to dedicate herself to her family. She married director and producer Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, with whom she remained for 65 years, until his death in 2016.
An almost eccentric choice for an industry founded on image and the obligation to be there: becoming a star and then refusing to live as if being a star were the only important thing.
Television, the Emmy and the return to the big screen
Television, after all, was her first home and continued to accompany her throughout her career.
In the 1970s he received several Emmy nominations. In the 1980s she played the mother of Cybill Shepherd's character in Moonlighting. In 1990 he finally won an Emmy for the miniseries People Like Us.
In the meantime she had also returned to the big screen. In 1986 she starred in Nothing in Common, playing the mother of Tom Hanks' character.
In the following years he continued to choose his roles sparingly. He appeared in Dreaming of Africa, My Four-Legged Friend and Don't Knock on My Door by Wim Wenders, alongside Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard.
In 2006 she played Martha Kent, Superman's adoptive mother, in Superman Returns. A curious short circuit in the history of cinema: the film also used archive images of Marlon Brando, his debut partner in On the Waterfront, in the role of Jor-El.
In 2014, at the age of ninety, he appeared again at the cinema in A Winter's Tale by Akiva Goldsman.
The standing ovation at the Oscars
In 2018 Eva Marie Saint returned to one of the stages that had marked her life.
He was 93 years old when he took the stage at the Oscars ceremony to present the award for best costume design. The audience stood up to applaud her.
More than half a century had passed since the evening when, very young and pregnant, she had held the statuette she had won thanks to On the Waterfront in her hands.
On July 4, 2024, Eva Marie Saint turned 100, celebrating together with four generations of her family.
Eva Marie Saint, the elegance of another Hollywood
With Eva Marie Saint, one of the last performers capable of connecting now very distant cinematic worlds disappears: the Actors Studio and Hollywood, Kazan and Hitchcock, the black and white of Marlon Brando and the Technicolor of Cary Grant, the live television of the fifties and the superhero cinema of the new millennium.
A career lasting more than seventy years without ever the need to occupy center stage at any cost.
Perhaps this is why Eva Marie Saint remains above all in two looks.
The one of Edie Doyle in front of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, when loving also means asking someone for the courage to choose.
And that of Eve Kendall in front of Cary Grant in North by Northwest, when loving instead means not being able to tell the whole truth.
In between, over seventy years of career and an elegance that didn't need to raise its voice to be remembered.
