Eva Marie Saint (born July 4, 1924) is an American retired actress. In a career that spanned nearly 80 years, she won an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for a Golden Globe Award and two British Academy Film Awards. Saint is the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner, and one of the last living stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Saint attended Bowling Green State University and began her career as a television and radio actress in the late 1940s. She played the role of Thelma in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful (1953). She made her film debut in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), opposite Marlon Brando. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress along with a BAFTA nomination for Most Promising Newcomer.
In a 2000 interview in Premiere magazine, Saint recalled making the film, which has been highly influential, saying, “[Elia] Kazan put me in a room with Marlon Brando. He said ‘Brando is the boyfriend of your sister. You’re not used to being with a young man. Don’t let him in the door under any circumstances.’ I don’t know what he told Marlon; you’ll have to ask him—good luck! [Brando] came in and started teasing me. He put me off balance. And I remained off balance for the whole shoot.” She repeated the anecdote in a 2010 interview.
Saint appeared alongside Bob Hope in That Certain Feeling (1956) for which she received $50,000. She was then offered $100,000 to star in the Civil War drama Raintree County (1957) with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. After that, she starred with Don Murray in A Hatful of Rain, the pioneering drug-addiction drama, which although made later than Raintree County was released earlier in 1957. She received a nomination for the “Best Foreign Actress” award from the British Academy of Film and Television for her performance.
Director Alfred Hitchcock surprised many by choosing Saint over dozens of other candidates for the femme fatale role in what was to become a suspense classic North by Northwest (1959) with Cary Grant and James Mason.
In 2000, recalling her experience making the picture with Cary Grant and Hitchcock, Saint said, “[Grant] would say, ‘See, Eva Marie, you don’t have to cry in a movie to have a good time. Just kick up your heels and have fun.’ Hitchcock said, ‘I don’t want you to do a sink-to-sink movie again, ever. You’ve done these black-and-white movies like On the Waterfront. It’s drab in that tenement house. Women go to the movies, and they’ve just left the sink at home. They don’t want to see you at the sink.’” In a 2010 interview she stated: “I said, ‘I can’t promise you that, Hitch, because I love those dramas.’”
Eva Marie Saint’s 1950s career was characterized by her versatility and ability to hold her own opposite major leading men and under the direction of esteemed filmmakers. Her success in this decade laid the foundation for a long and distinguished career.
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