“The longer you live, I think really the smarter you get…and hopefully, as an actress, that makes you a better actress, because you can understand things better.” Words of wisdom from the fascinating and elegant Eva Marie Saint, as told to TCM’s late host Robert Osborne in an interview that first aired in 2014.
This special, Eva Marie Saint: Live From the TCM Classic Film Festival, is being replayed on July 4 (10/9c), marking her 100th birthday. It’s also the first of four Thursdays celebrating her as Star of the Month, a tribute that includes 1954’s On the Waterfront (8/7c). Her first feature film role, as the sensitive Edie Doyle, won Saint an Oscar as supporting actress opposite her Actors Studio colleague Marlon Brando.
“I felt that he could see right through me,” she marvels, recalling that Brando’s unpredictable line readings for each take “kept you on your toes.”
She was so pregnant at the Oscar ceremony that she blurted, “I may have the baby right here” during her acceptance speech. (She gave birth to her son Darrell two days later.)
Another career highlight: being chosen by Alfred Hitchcock to play one of his most memorable blonde heroines, the “sexy spy lady” Eve Kendall in 1959’s North by Northwest (11:15/10:15c) opposite Cary Grant. Saint remembers Hitchcock escorting her to Bergdorf Goodman to choose her stylish wardrobe (“I called him my sugar daddy”) and Grant welcoming her to the set by promising, “In this movie, Eva Marie, you don’t have to cry.”
Saint honed her craft in roles on radio and in the early days of live TV, earning two Emmy nominations in the 1950s and winning in 1990 for a supporting role in the NBC miniseries People Like Us. “Characters have to be interesting, as they are in life,” Saint told Osborne a decade ago. You can see for yourself how she lived up to that ideal all month long.