At the water’s edge was Eva Marie Saint’s first film job after years in theater and television.
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Columbia TriStar/Getty Images
At the water’s edge was Eva Marie Saint’s first film job after years in theater and television.
Columbia TriStar/Getty Images
Eva Marie Saint, who starred in Elia Kazan’s 1954 At the water’s edge and 1959 by Alfred Hitchcock North by North-West, died Tuesday at age 102.
Saint grew up in Albany and Delmar, New York. It was a delicate porcelain beauty. She attended the Actors Studio in New York, performed on Broadway, and did live television in the late 1940s. But Saint didn’t make a movie until she was almost 30, after director Elia Kazan suggested she do a test screening with a guy named Marlon Brando. They made a scene of At the water’s edge in which Saint is supposed to keep Brando out of his house.
Saint plays femme fatale Eve Kendall in 1959 North by northwest.
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
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Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
Saint plays femme fatale Eve Kendall in 1959 North by northwest.
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
In 2000, Saint told WHYY’s Fresh air“I don’t know what happened, but… (Brando) came into the living room. We were dancing, we were laughing, I was crying. He was taking my skirt and… whipping it, and the sparks flew. And Kazan saw that. And suddenly I was in At the water’s edge“.
In this film, Saint plays Edie, a Catholic schoolgirl who finds herself in the middle of union corruption in Hoboken, New Jersey. When her longshoreman brother is murdered, Edie wants justice. Saint won an Oscar for his performance.
Five years after playing the chaste heroine Edie, Saint plays a femme fatale opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s film. North by northwest. But Saint wasn’t a femme fatale off-screen. After marrying director Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, she limited her roles to devote more time to her children. She returned to television in the 1970s and won an Emmy in 1990 for the miniseries. People like us.
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