Eva Marie Saint

Oddly, I think she was funnier in the drama I think of her in than the comedy. In the comedy, she mostly played a fluttering American housewife. To be fair, she’s in a remarkably stressful situation in The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! But so is everyone else, and just about everyone else gets to be funnier than she does. But in North by Northwest, as the cool Eve Kendall, she gets moments of devastating wit, usually at Cary Grant’s expense. And now I really do have to go back and watch The Legend of Korra to see her as the elderly Katara.

She is, I think, the first person to have the chance to cross over from television stardom to movie stardom. I could be wrong on that. But her earliest TV credits are so old that we’re lucky to have them recorded; she was an NBC page in 1947, and her earliest credits are on kinescope. When she started in television, it was still a novelty. There were only a few million TV sets in the entire country at the time; I suspect large parts of the country couldn’t watch anything on them anyway. And twenty-three-year-old Eva Marie Saint was there.

In 1954, she made the jump to television. I don’t actually like On the Waterfront, but from what I’ve read, a fair number of people were disdainful about her abilities. There was no way, they said, that she would be able to hold the weight of the script. I grant you that I’ve never seen any of the movies her competitors were in—never even heard of two of them—and it does not seem to have been a terribly strong year in the Best Supporting Actress category. But she did win her Oscar, and even I don’t think it was just because of the weakness of the category.

She was still considered an unlikely choice for Eve Kendall, but there we are. She nails the role. Hitchcock convinced her to cut her hair, then to her waist, to be sleek and together, the placid femme fatale. The kept woman. She is exquisite in the role. She keeps Cary Grant, and the audience, guessing. Frankly, she’s so good in it that I can never remember she’s the considerably lesser Elspeth Whittaker; that movie is really a love story between Carl Reiner and Alan Arkin for most of its runtime anyway. She’s there because Walt Whittaker needs a wife for the story to work.

Of living Oscar-winning actresses, only Olivia de Havilland is older. And de Havilland has been retired for decades; Saint’s most recent roles are only four years old, and she might easily work again. She’s never done as much as she might have; for decades, she took only a few roles here and there to concentrate on her marriage (which lasted sixty-five years) and her children instead. Frankly, it wouldn’t entirely surprise me to see someone cast her in a good, juicy role again. I’m sure there’s a script out there that would tempt her.

I’m never going to be able to afford Eve Kendall’s wardrobe, but I’m saving up for a really nice Ren faire coat. Consider supporting my Patreon to help me buy it!

Eva Marie Saint died October 6, 2026.