Eva Marie Saint
Eva Marie Saint is an American retired actress. In a career spanning more than seven decades, she received an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award., Saint is the oldest-living and earliest-surviving Academy Award winner. She is one of the last living stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Saint graduated from 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. She made her film debut in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, 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.
From then on, Saint appeared in a variety of films, including Raintree County, opposite Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor; and Fred Zinnemann's A Hatful of Rain, opposite Don Murray and Anthony Franciosa, for which she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama; and Eve Kendall in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, opposite Cary Grant. In the 1960s, Saint appeared in Exodus, alongside Paul Newman; The Sandpiper, which reunited her with Elizabeth Taylor and featured Richard Burton; 36 Hours with James Garner; The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, alongside Carl Reiner and Alan Arkin; and John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix, opposite Yves Montand and in her second film with James Garner.
Early life
Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, to John Merle Saint and Eva Marie Saint. Her parents were Quakers. She attended Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar, New York, graduating in 1942. Saint studied acting at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where she joined the Delta Gamma sorority. During this time, she played the lead role in a production of Personal Appearance. She was an active member in the theater honorary fraternity, Theta Alpha Phi, and served as record keeper of the student council in 1944. Saint graduated from Bowling Green in 1946, and a theater on its campus is named after her.Career
Early television career
Saint's introduction to television began as an NBC page. She appeared in the live NBC-TV show Campus Hoopla in 1946-47. Her performances on this program are recorded on rare kinescope, and audio recordings of these telecasts are preserved in the Library of Congress. She also appeared in Bonnie Maid's Versa-Tile Varieties on NBC in 1949 as one of the original singing "Bonnie Maids" used in the live commercials.Saint appeared in a 1947 Life special about television, and also in a 1949 feature Life article about her as a struggling actress earning minimum amounts from early TV while trying to make ends meet in New York City.
In 1954, Saint won the Outer Critics Circle Special Award for her Broadway stage role in the Horton Foote play The Trip to Bountiful, in which she co-starred with actresses such as Lillian Gish and Jo Van Fleet.
In 1955, Saint was nominated for her first Emmy for "Best Actress In A Single Performance" on The Philco Television Playhouse, playing the young mistress of middle-aged E. G. Marshall in Middle of the Night by Paddy Chayefsky. She won another Emmy nomination for the 1955 television musical version of Our Town, adapted from the Thornton Wilder play of the same name. Co-stars were Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. Her success and acclaim in TV productions were of such a high level that "one slightly hyperbolic primordial TV critic dubbed her 'the Helen Hayes of television.'"
''On the Waterfront''
Saint made her feature film debut in On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando and directed by Elia Kazan—a performance for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the role of Edie Doyle, with her competitors including Claire Trevor, Nina Foch, Katy Jurado and Jan Sterling. She also earned a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award nomination for "Most Promising Newcomer". In his review for The New York Times, film critic A. H. Weiler wrote, "In casting Eva Marie Saint—a newcomer to movies from TV and Broadway—Mr. Kazan has come up with a pretty and blond artisan who does not have to depend on these attributes. Her parochial school training is no bar to love with the proper stranger. Amid scenes of carnage, she gives tenderness and sensitivity to genuine romance." The film was a major success and launched Saint's film career. She received $7,500 for the role.In a 2000 interview in Premiere magazine, Saint recalled making the film, which has been highly influential, saying, " 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! 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. Her appearance in On The Waterfront is referenced in the lyrics of the 1984 song Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.
Saint appeared alongside Bob Hope in That Certain Feeling for which she received $50,000. She was then offered $100,000 to star in the Civil War drama Raintree County 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.
''North by Northwest''
Director Alfred Hitchcock surprised many by choosing Saint over dozens of other candidates for the femme fatale role in what was to become the suspense classic North by Northwest with Cary Grant and James Mason. Written by Ernest Lehman, the film updated and expanded upon the director's early "wrong man" spy adventures of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, including The 39 Steps, Young and Innocent and Saboteur. North by Northwest became a box-office hit and an influence on spy films for decades. The film ranks number forty on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time.Hitchcock worked with Saint to make her voice lower and huskier, and personally chose costumes for her during a shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman in New York City.
The change in Saint's screen persona, coupled with her adroit performance as a seductive woman of mystery who keeps Cary Grant off balance, was widely heralded. In his review of August 7, 1959, The New York Times critic Abe H. Weiler wrote, "In casting Eva Marie Saint as romantic vis-a-vis, Mr. Hitchcock has plumbed some talents not shown by the actress heretofore. Although she is seemingly a hard, designing type, she also emerges both the sweet heroine and a glamorous charmer."
In 2000, recalling her experience making the picture with Cary Grant and Hitchcock, Saint said, " 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.'"
Mid-career
Although North by Northwest might have propelled her to the top ranks of stardom, Saint chose to limit her film work in order to spend time with her husband since 1951, director Jeffrey Hayden, and their two children. In the 1960s, Saint continued to distinguish herself in both high-profile and offbeat pictures. She co-starred with Paul Newman in Exodus, a historical drama about the founding of the state of Israel adapted from the novel of the same name by Leon Uris. It was directed by Otto Preminger. She also co-starred with Warren Beatty, Karl Malden and Angela Lansbury as a tragic beauty in the drama All Fall Down. Based upon a novel by James Leo Herlihy and a screenplay by William Inge, the film was directed by John Frankenheimer.Saint appeared with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the melodrama The Sandpiper for Vincente Minnelli, and with James Garner in the World War II thriller 36 Hours, directed by George Seaton. Saint joined an all-star cast in the comedic satire, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, directed by Norman Jewison, and the international racing drama, Grand Prix directed by Frankenheimer and presented in Cinerama.
Saint received some of her best reviews for her performance in Loving, co-starring as the wife of George Segal. The film was about a commercial artist's relationship with his wife and other women; it was critically acclaimed but did not have wide viewership.
Because of the mostly second-rate film roles that came her way in the 1970s, Saint returned to television and the stage in the 1980s. She received an Emmy nomination for the 1977 miniseries How The West Was Won and a 1978 Emmy nomination for Taxi!!!. She was reunited with On the Waterfront co-star Karl Malden in the television film Fatal Vision, this time as the wife of his character, as he investigated the murder of his daughter and granddaughters. She played the mother of Cybill Shepherd in the television series Moonlighting, a role that spanned episodes over three years.