Eva Marie Saint dies at 102, one of the last legends of classic Hollywood

BarcelonaThe Hollywood of the golden age has lost one of its last icons. Eva Marie Saint, who died at her home in Los Angeles at 102 years old from natural causes, was an actress of dramatic prominence and defiant beauty who worked with all the great names of her era: Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Newman, Elia Kazan, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck... A career that spans seven decades of film history but which shone especially in the 50s, when she debuted with On the Waterfront, a masterful face-to-face with Brando that earned her the Oscar, and also when in 1959 she starred with Cary Grant in the Hitchcock classic North by Northwest.

Saint was born in Newark (New Jersey) in 1924, when the Hollywood Academy had not yet been founded. In 2018, when she presented an award at the Oscars, she boasted before a captivated audience of being "the oldest member of the Academy." Daughter of a Quaker couple, Eva Marie Saint trained as an actress in university theater and in the burgeoning television industry, where she participated in a play, The Trip to Bountiful, which was also performed on Broadway. There she was discovered by Elia Kazan, who was looking for an innocent face for the crime drama On the Waterfront (1954), about a longshoreman who exposes an extortion racket at the port. An extraordinary film stained by its context: Kazan had recently testified against some of his communist colleagues during the McCarthy witch hunt, and the film was essentially an eulogy for the figure of the informer.

In the film, the actress played the sister of a port worker murdered by the mafia, a young and idealistic girl with no experience with men who finds herself attracted to Brando's character. Saint used her own inexperience in cinema in favor of the character, and built a convincing sexual tension with Brando. In 1955, the actress accepted the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress while pregnant with her first child. "I'm so happy I could give birth right here," she said. She wasn't exaggerating much: the baby was born two days later.

Model for the great Bond girls

The other defining role for Eva Marie Saint was that of the secret agent who makes Cary Grant fall in love in the extraordinary North by Northwest (1959). The studio wanted Cyd Charisse for the role, but Hitchcock invited Saint to dinner and was delighted with her; following her mother's advice, she dressed in beige for the occasion and wore white gloves, a fetish of the director. During filming, she got along wonderfully with Cary Grant, whom she always described as charming and possessing a supernatural talent. Hitchcock took her shopping and decided on her entire wardrobe from head to toe, but the only acting instructions he gave her were: "Don't use your hands, use a deeper voice, and always look at Cary." It was enough: the role of Eve Kendall stands out from the usual innocent blondes in Hitchcock's filmography and has been recognized as the model upon which the great Bond girls of the 007 saga were forged.

Although Hitchcock urged her to do more glamorous films and fewer "kitchen dramas," Eva Marie Saint prioritized serious roles such as the epic Western Raintree County, with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; Vincent Minnelli's romantic drama The Sandpiper (1957) –completing a love triangle with Taylor and Richard Burton–, and the film about the founding of the state of Israel Exodus (1960), with Paul Newman. Always in good company, Saint played opposite Warren Beatty in one of his first great works, the family drama All Fall Down (1962). However, good roles began to become scarce during the 60s, and after the notable drama about the crisis of a married man and womanizer Loving (1970), a direct precursor to the series Mad Men, Saint moved away from cinema and took refuge in television and theater.

Her maturity as an actress brought a long list of mother roles: mother of Tom Hanks in the comedy Nothing in Common (1986), mother of Cybill Shepard in several episodes of the series Moonlighting, mother of Sam Shepard in the neo-Western by Wim Wenders Don't Come Knocking (2005), adoptive mother of Superman in Superman Returns (2006)... In 2010, in an interview with the Independent newspaper of Santa Barbara, she agreed with her friend –and still a survivor of the Golden Age of Hollywood– Angela Lansbury, who stated that all roles for older women were for neurotic or disabled characters. "Other actresses will play those roles –Saint said–, and they will do them well. But I have decided not to do them." Her last film work was the 2014 supernatural drama Winter's Tale, where at least she did not play a mother.