Eva Marie Saint, who died on Tuesday at age 102, was a tremendous actress.
She was awarded an Oscar, for the absorbing and skilled performance she gave in her feature film debut--as Edie Doyle, opposite Marlon Brando and Karl Malden, in Elia Kazan's riveting On the Waterfront (1954).
She co-starred with Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). I can't count the number of times I have watched the film; with every viewing I have admired, enormously, all that she brought to the role of Eve Kendall, in what is certainly one of Hitchcock's finest movies.
Ms. Saint appeared in a long list of films and television programs through the decades. Before her film stardom, in On the Waterfront, she had appeared regularly in live television productions--including the series One Man's Family (1950-1952), the anthology drama series Studio One (a few telecasts, between 1949 and 1953), and the 1953 telecast of The Trip to Bountiful, written by Horton Foote. The Trip to Bountiful was brought to Broadway later that year, and Ms. Saint, as with the television program, had a starring role in the play.
Her films included Raintree County (1957), A Hatful of Rain (also in 1957), Exodus (1960), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), and Winter's Tale (2014).
In late 1996 or early 1997, Ms. Saint and her husband, noted television director Jeffrey Hayden, appeared in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a public showing of a television documentary--Children in America's Schools--that their production company, the Saint/Hayden Company, released in 1996. Mr. Hayden directed and wrote the program, in addition to producing it with Ms. Saint. The host of the documentary was Bill Moyers.
Ms. Saint and Mr. Hayden, who married in 1951, discussed the documentary, and their careers, on a radio talk show I hosted at the time in Charlottesville. They were gracious, kind, engaging, and uncommonly interesting--and I've always regarded the hour or so during which we spoke as being one of the most enjoyable times I've ever spent on the radio.
Here are the IMDb.com pages for Ms. Saint, and Mr. Hayden, who died in 2016 at age 90.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001693/?ref_=nm_ov_bio_lk
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0370749/?ref_=nmbio_sp_1
Here, too, is the New York Times obituary of Ms. Saint:
