Eva Marie Saint reaches her 100th birthday as the earliest surviving and the oldest living Academy Award winner. Cinema Paradiso joins the celebrations.
On 4 July 2024, Eva Marie Saint will leave an exclusive club of Oscar winners in their nineties. By reaching her 100th birthday, she will bid adieu to songwriter Alan Bergman, actor-directors Lee Grant and Mel Brooks, French documentarist Marcel Ophüls, actress Estelle Parsons, writer-director James Ivory, actors Gene Hackman and Joanne Woodward, actor-director Clint Eastwood, and actress Rita Moreno, who are all nonagenarians.
They will be joined in September by Sophia Loren, who became the first performer to win an Oscar for a film in a foreign language, with Vittorio De Sica's Two Women (1960). But Eva Marie Saint now becomes the fourth Oscar-winning performer to reach three figures. She will pass George Burns and go into third place in mid-August and Cinema Paradiso wishes her all the very best in seeking to reel in Olivia De Havilland and Luise Rainer (who each lived to be 104) and become acting's longest-lived Academy Award winner.
The Country Girl
Eva Marie Saint was born in Newark, New Jersey on 4 July 1924. She spent the first part of her childhood in the Jackson Heights district of Queens before her Quaker parents moved to Bayside. Eventually, they settled in Delmar, a hamlet in New York state, where Eva Marie grew up with her younger sister, Adelaide.
Father John Merle Saint, who had served in the Great War, worked for the B.F. Goodrich tyre company, while mother Eva Marie Rice was a teacher before she became a homemaker. 'He was a dear father.' the actress once recalled, 'and he worked so hard, six out of seven days a week. And my mother cooked, and gardened, and made all our clothes. It was the Depression, of course, and it must have been hard for them. But I never felt in want of anything.'
Living in the countryside, Eva Marie developed a love of the outdoors and spent hours watching wildlife in the woods and Normans Kill Creek. She enjoyed family picnics, playing baseball in the park with her father, and ice skating in the winter. As a teenager, she learned to play the ukulele at summer camp. When not acting out film scenes in front of the mirror, she was doing Tarzan yells on a rope swing in the backyard.
At Bethlehem Central High School, Saint (who then had a mane of dark curls) was known as 'Bubbles' and was voted the girl with the most charm in her senior year. She was also actively involved in the student council, as well as lots of clubs and societies. 'I was always part of something,' she later reminisced. 'I was in the chorus in high school, not a soloist. I was on the basketball team. I was in modern dance, part of the group. I was a cheerleader, part of the group. I played the violin, part of the orchestra. I never wanted to be out there alone. Ever.'
Despite being involved in so many activities, Saint never considered acting. Indeed, she enrolled at Bowling Green State University with the intention of becoming a third-grade teacher. However, during her sophomore year, someone dared her to try out for a play at the campus theatre entitled, Personal Appearance. 'It was a comedy,' Saint remembered. 'The role was a Hollywood siren with her hair up on top and a slinky gown. And I thought to myself, "Hmm. I don't know. I'll think about it."' The buzz around the theatre proved addictive and Saint landed the role and changed her course so that she could study acting. Among her other student credits was Rosalind in As You Like It, which remains her sole brush with Shakespeare.
During the summer vacation of 1946, Saint wrote to Dr Elden T. Smith, the husband of her Delta Gamma house mother, who was the head of the university's speech and drama department. She asked about acting as a career and whether he thought she had any talent. 'He wrote me the most wonderful letter of encouragement,' Saint later revealed in an interview, 'I still have it right here in my desk, I've never not had it with me - and I thought, Well, if he thinks I can do it...'
Doing the Rounds
Having enjoyed the communality of being in a cast, Saint found striking out alone in New York somewhat intimidating. As she could commute to the city, she continued to live at home and raised eyebrows at one modelling agency, when she brought her mother to an appointment. In an interview with her journalist grandson, she admitted she disliked posing for the camera. 'I felt very, very self-conscious. Why? Because you are yourself. You're not playing a role; you're not somebody else. You are you. Whatever is there, it's you, and you're not creating a different person. I was just really self-conscious.' While Saint disliked modelling, advertisements got her face known, as she sought work on stage, radio, and the new medium of television.
After a year of doing the rounds, Saint made her debut on the radio, as a long distance telephone operator. She began picking up roles in soap operas, as well as appearing in shows like Rosemary and Buck Rogers for $30 a time. Her first TV booking was on The Borden Show, a variety showcase for which she was hired to applaud off screen. The following week, she got to sit at a table in shot and the $10 she earned enabled her to buy a dress that helped her land a Keds shoe commercial, in which she recycled an old school cheerleading chant.
Another advert for linoleum followed, but Saint still didn't have an agent. As she reflected, 'I had a little booklet and I'd get up and out at nine o'clock in the morning and I'd make my rounds. I'd find out where the auditions were, I'd find out who was casting.' Her parents had given her a year to start earning her living and Saint decided she was ready to leave home and live in New York.
She rented an apartment on Morningside Drive with radio actress Peggy Lobbin. It was so basic that they had to turn the bathtub upside down to use as a table. But they loved being independent, even though landlady, Mrs Abernathy, banned boys, smoking, and alcohol from her rooms. Indeed, Saint nearly got into trouble when she was given a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon after shooting a beer commercial. Eventually, the friends moved into a basement in Central Park East, where Saint realised that she could never date another actor, as she got so jealous when the phone kept ringing with job offers for Lobbin while she was 'resting'.
Saint was rarely idle, however, as she sought to catch her big break. She thought it had come in 1947, when she was cast as a nurse opposite Henry Fonda in Joshua Logan's Broadway production of Mister Roberts. Her friends and family got to see her perform in the out-of-town previews, but Saint was devastated when she was fired before opening night for looking 'too innocent'. Fonda had come to her dressing room to offer sympathy and recall the times he had also been ditched, but Saint was inconsolable at being replaced by Marlon Brando's sister, Jocelyn.
'I'll never be that disappointed in life again,' Saint told one reporter. On the Subway ride home, she had given herself a stern lecture. 'You can never, ever allow yourself to feel like you feel right now. You'll never make it in acting. You're not going to make it in life. I couldn't survive feeling like I did losing that part.' As she confided in another interview, 'By the time I got to Flushing, I had made up my mind to continue attempting to be an actress, but I would never ever allow it to get to my heart. And I've been rejected, and it never has since. I knew I was not strong enough to handle it if I allowed it to get to my heart.'
In order to give herself a better chance, Saint started taking acting classes. Initially, she trained with Herbert Berghof, but found a mentor in Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, which had just been founded by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Robert Lewis. Among those who also attended classes during the first year were Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Karl Malden, Julie Harris, Hume Cronyn, and Jessica Tandy. Strasberg taught Saint the value of people watching. 'The time between jobs is as important as the jobs themselves,' he averred. 'That's the time when you're living. That's the time when you're observing. That's the time you're interacting with other people.' Although Saint had rising aspirations, Strasberg helped keep her grounded. When she had to leave a session early to do a live television commercial, he told her never to be embarrassed by any job. 'You like to eat?' he asked her. 'You like to have a roof over your head?'
Another boost to her confidence came when she met up-and-coming director Jeffrey Hayden. He had spotted her on the train and had looked her up from the name embossed on the front of her modelling portfolio. She turned down two coffee invitations before he asked her to lunch, despite her trying to put him off by claiming to be a gold digger. They would be married for 65 years and have two children, Darrelle and Laurette, and four grandchildren.
Television was still mostly live in 1947, but Saint's appearances on NBC's Campus Hoopla were recorded on kinescope and are now preserved in the Library of Congress. She was featured in a Life article on live TV in 1947 and graced the magazine again two years later in a spread on how struggling actors make ends meet. In fact, Saint learned a good deal rehearsing for shows like One Man's Family (1950-52), in which she played Claudia Barbour Roberts. During one episode, the actor playing her father-in-law forgot his lines and Saint had to improvise a way to end the scene so that the director could cut to a commercial.
On another occasion, Saint worked on Person to Person with the great Edward R. Murrow, who was superbly played by David Strathairn in George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Just as the show was about to start, Saint felt a call of nature. However, the engineer forgot to cancel her microphone and she returned to the set to be informed by her producer that 'everybody across the country heard you pee'. Even more embarrassingly, she had a costume malfunction during another live transmission.
'We were in this tank on the set,' Saint recalled, 'it was supposed to be a pool - and we're doing the scene and I see this stagehand pulling at his shirt and waving at me. Well, I just ignored him, of course. Why is he waving at me? Until I looked down and saw that my bathing suit has slipped and there were my breasts, on live television. I ducked down into that water very quickly!' Looking back on her time in live TV, Saint claimed, 'It was an incredible learning experience. I would not have wanted any other experience, because I've never been nervous since. It was a bloodbath. I don't get nervous on a stage, I don't get nervous in interviews. I don't get nervous.'
Such experiences on shows like Martin Kane, Private Eye (1952-53), in which she played Sheila Dixon in 40 episodes opposite William Gargan, shaped Saint's approach to acting, as she made her overdue debut on Broadway in Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful in 1953. This had started out on live TV and made a rare transfer to the Great White Way, with Saint and silent legend Lillian Gish reprising the roles of Thelma and Carrie that would be taken in Peter Masterson's 1985 film version by Rebecca De Mornay and Geraldine Page, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In fact, the show closed after just 39 performances. But Saint won the Outer Critics Circle Award. Moreover, it brought her to the attention of Elia Kazan.
Overnight Star
'I never wanted to make a movie,' Saint once confided in an interview. 'During the few rounds I had made they would ask me how much I weighed, my height, and my bust size. And I thought, "This is silly. This is not for me. I want to stay in the theatre."' But, when Elia Kazan offered her the chance to co-star with Marlon Brando, she couldn't refuse, especially as it meant she would pip such performers as Claire Trevor, Nina Foch, Katy Jurado, and Jan Sterling to the role. In order to test the pair's chemistry, the director told Saint to improvise a scene in which she was to trying to stop her sister's boyfriend from entering a room. She failed and they wound up dancing to the radio and it was only when Brando flipped her skirt that Saint snapped back into reality and started crying with embarrassment. Despite the tears, Kazan knew she could hold her own with the world's most renowned Method actor. But, while she was cast as Edie Doyle in On the Waterfront (1954), Saint never felt comfortable with her co-star. 'He put me off balance,' she remembered. 'And I remained off balance for the whole shoot.'
Initially, Edie is suspicious of ex-boxer Terry Malloy (Brando), who is hiding the fact that he had been involved in the death of her longshoreman brother on the Hoboken docks. But, charmed by his gentleness when she sees him tending to his racing pigeons, Edie comes to trust Terry, even though his brother, Charley (Rod Steiger), is a fixer for Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), a mob boss who illegally controls the dockland workforce.
Saint accidentally dropped a white glove while rehearsing the scene in which Edie realises that tough guy Terry has a softer side. Rather than hand it back, however, Brando sat on a swing and tried it on. Kazan was so taken with this bit of business that he told them to repeat it on camera. 'He was the finest actor I've ever worked with,' Saint reflected. 'He was profound in the way he listened. He could change the thought behind the dialogue with an inflection - and make a scene come alive. He made you a better actor.' Despite their closeness on the set, however, Saint only saw Brando once after the picture wrapped. 'Years later,' she mused, 'Elizabeth Taylor was having a birthday party and he came into the room - I was so excited to see him. He came up, we hugged, and he saw a pretty young brunette over my shoulder. He said good-bye and that was the last time I ever saw him.'
Brando would be rewarded with his first Oscar for Best Actor, as On the Waterfront converted eight of its 12 nominations. Budd Schulberg's screenplay was not without its controversies, however, as it was seen as a riposte to High Noon (1952), Fred Zinnemann's parable on the Communist witch-hunt that had been dividing the American entertainment industry since 1947. But Saint's debut performance (for which she was only paid $7500) made her an overnight star, as she won the BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Heavily pregnant on collecting her statuette, Saint joked, 'Thank you, I'm so excited. I may have the baby right here.'
Rather than seek her fortune in Hollywood, however, Saint returned to what she considered her day job. She received Emmy nominations for Paddy Chayefsky's Middle of the Night and Delbert Mann's musical take on Thornton Wilder's Our Town (both 1954), which co-starred Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman. One critic proclaimed her 'the Helen Hayes of television', while she also drew plaudits for her return to the stage in a 1955 production of The Rainmaker, which would be filmed two years later by Joseph Anthony, with Katharine Hepburn in the role of Lizzie Curry.
A $50,000 pay cheque to make Norman Panama and Melvin Frank's That Certain Feeling (1956) finally lured Saint back into the film fold. With Hayden also receiving offers on the West Coast, the pair reluctantly left New York. Wearing chic outfits that anticipated Doris Day's 'career woman' style, Saint amuses by playing it straight as the woman caught between rival cartoonists Bob Hope and George Sanders. Sadly, though, this sparky comedy is not currently on disc and neither is Edward Dmytryk's Raintree County nor Fred Zinnemann's A Hatful of Rain (both 1957).
Finished first, but released second, Raintree County was a Civil War saga that saw Southern belle Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor) steal poet John Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift) away from small-town school ma'am, Nell Gaither (Saint). Contrasting with this costume epic (for which Saint's fee had risen to $100,000), A Hatful of Rain was a 'problem picture', in which the pregnant Celia Pope (Saint) has to cope with the fact that both husband Johnny (Don Murray) and brother-in-law Polo (Anthony Franciosa) are drug addicts.
Fresh from receiving Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, Saint was informed by new agent Kurt Frings that Alfred Hitchcock wanted to have lunch with her. As Saint remembered, 'I called my mother (who had never read a movie magazine; I don't know where she got this) and she told me that he liked women in beige and white gloves. I wore the outfit, and had a wonderful luncheon with him and his wife, Alma [Reville]. He was charming and lovely, and by the time I got home the agent had called me and told me I had the part.'
The film was North By Northwest (1959) and the part was Eve Kendall, the government agent whose mission to earn the trust of Cold War spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) is compromised when Madison Avenue advertising executive, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), is mistaken for George Kaplan, a non-existent agent who Vandamm believes is on his tail.
With MGM keen to cast Cyd Charisse, Hitchcock (in an echo of Vertigo, 1958) took Saint clothes shopping at New York's famous Bergdorf Goodman department store, which was memorably profiled in Matthew Miele's documentary, Scatter My Ashes At Bergdorf's (2013). Hitch also worked with Saint to ensure her voice was lower and huskier and she later joked, 'I wish I knew what he had seen in me, in that he saw me as a sexy spy lady.'
Unlike Grace Kelly and Kim Novak, however, Saint was asked to be less vulnerable than the typical Hitchcock blonde, as Thornhill is technically the damsel in distress, who is duped into playing the patsy during an encounter on a train with the slinky seduction line, 'It's going to be a long night and I don't particularly like the book I've started.' After escaping from the United Nations, an auction house, and a crop-dusting plane, Thornhill does have to come to Eve's rescue when they find themselves clinging to the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota.
Shooting the scene on a Culver City soundstage just two weeks after having her second child, Saint felt unusually nervous, as there was quite a drop to the safety mats on the studio floor. At one point, she scraped her elbow, but turned the incident to her advantage. 'I knew they wouldn't stop filming,' she said, 'but I thought, coming from the Actors Studio, if you get hurt, you get hurt. So I rubbed my elbow."
Saint enjoyed working with Grant enormously, joking, 'I felt at times I should be paying them to do this film.' At one point, Grant told her, 'See, Eva Marie, you don't have to cry in a movie to have a good time. Just kick up your heels and have fun.' When he took her to a show in Chicago, she was amazed by the adulation he received and wondered how he could cope with such celebrity. He insisted that he could detach himself from his star persona, but Saint later told a reporter, 'I know I couldn't have coped with that kind of fame. And I've never had it - thank the Lord! People recognise me, but I wanted a normal life.'
She was equally impressed by Hitchcock. 'I adored him!' she enthused. 'He didn't direct actors much, unlike Kazan. The moves were all in Hitch's head. He was a perfectionist.' He was also a control freak and he told Saint, 'I don't want you to do a sink-to-sink movie again, ever. You've done these black-and-white movies like On the Waterfront. It's drab in that tenement house. Women go to the movies, and they've just left the sink at home. They don't want to see you at the sink.' However, she replied, 'I can't promise you that, Hitch, because I love those dramas.' She didn't work with the Master of Suspense again and he replaced her in The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) with Tippi Hedren, whose relationship with Hitchcock is explored in Julian Jarrold's The Girl (2012).
Mom First, Star Second
Family meant everything to Saint. Thus, she was more than prepared to pass on film projects in order to be a homemaker. As her agent told her when she turned down a lucrative three-picture deal, 'Eva Marie, you'll never be a superstar.' She did reunite with Paul Newman in Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960), but very much on her own terms. When he heard that Saint had a clause inserted into her contract that ensured her husband, children, parents, and mother-in-law travelled with her, the usually fearsome Austrian director called her to joke, 'You've created your own Exodus!'
In this sprawling epic adaptation of Leon Uris's novel about the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. Saint played Kitty Fremont, a widowed American nurse who volunteers at an internment camp for Holocaust survivors on Cyprus and winds up sailing south after befriending the orphaned Karen Hansen Clement (Jill Haworth); her protector, Dov Landau (Sol Mineo); and Haganah rebel
Ari Ben Canaan (Newman). Some critics view the film's legacy as problematic, but it typified the kind of big-screen spectacle on which Hollywood was banking at the time in order to lure people away from their television set.
However, they could watch dramas on a similar scale to John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down (1962) from the comfort of their armchairs. As a result, this adaptation of John Leo Herlihy's novel about the fraught relationship between abusive womaniser Berry-Berry Willart (Warren Beatty) and thirtysomething family friend, Echo O'Brien (Saint), has been somewhat overlooked, in spite of the potent performances and sterling support provided by Angela Lansbury, Karl Malden, and Brandon deWilde. Ever the Actors Studio alum, Saint insisted on being doused in cold water for the scene in which she runs out into a rainstorm, so that her shivering would seem realistic.
There was also a small-screen feel about George Seaton's 36 Hours (1964), which has also prevented it from being better known. Roald Dahl sued the production because the premise resembled that in his own short story, 'Beware of the Dog'. So, the producers gave Dahl a credit, even though Carl K. Hittleman and Luis Vance insisted that their story was an original. Once again, Sant played a nurse. But Anna Hedler has only agreed to help Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor) trick abducted American officer, Jefferson Pike (James Garner), into thinking the war is over so that he will let slip details of the D-Day invasion because she would do anything to escape the brutal treatment she had experienced in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.
With Werner Peters impressing as SS officer, Otto Schack, this is well worth a watch. As is A Carol For Another Christmas (1964), a retelling of Charles Dickens's Yuletide favourite that was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz from a teleplay by Rod Serling (the creator of The Twilight Zone, 1959-64). Saint plays Lieutenant Gibson, a WAVE driver who takes Daniel Grudge (Sterling Hayden) to a hospital for the victims of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima. She is only part of an ensemble here, but she's front and centre in Vincente Minnelli's The Sandpiper (1965), which was co-scripted by two blacklisted screenwriters, Michael Wilson and Dalton Trumbo. Again, no one has seen fit to release this stylish drama on disc in the UK, even though Saint more than holds her own against power couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, as free-spirited artist, Laura Reynolds (Taylor), comes between headmaster, Dr Edward Hewitt (Burton), and his teacher wife, Claire (Saint).
Happily, we can bring you Norman Jewison's splendid Cold War satire, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966). Once again, Saint demonstrated her subtle comic touch while playing it straight, as Elspeth, the model wife of Walt Whittaker (Carl Reiner), a vacationing playwright who discovers that Yuri Rozanov (Alan Arkin) has come ashore to find a boat to free the Soviet submarine that has run aground on a sandbar off the New England coast. And Saint stood out in another all-star cast in John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), a Cinerama saga that is beloved by petrol-heads for the thrilling motor-racing sequences. James Garner co-starred, but saw little of Saint, whose storyline as glamorous magazine editor Louise Frederickson turns around her affair with veteran French driver, Jean-Pierre Sarti (Yves Montand), whose angry spouse, Monique (Geneviève Page), refuses to give him a divorce.
Saint only made three more features over the next two decades and none is currently rentable, even though they all have things to recommend them. Saint and Gregory Peck butted heads, as Sarah Carver reluctantly relies on Army scout Sam Varner to protect her half-Apache son from his warrior father in Robert Mulligan's The Stalking Moon (1968). Saint also achieved an uneasy rapport with George Segal in Irvin Kershner's Loving (1970), as mother-of-two Selma Wilson runs out of patience with her philandering illustrator husband, Brooks.
And Bob Hope requested the pleasure of Saint's company again, as he ended his long-standing relationship with Paramount in Paul Bogart's Cancel My Reservation (1972). The humour is somewhat forced, as TV personality Dan Bartlett has to convince wife and co-star, Sheila, that he's not having a fling on his Arizona ranch with the impetuous Crazy Hollister (Anne Archer). The revelations about the Kent-born Hope's duplicitous private life mean he'll probably never come back into vogue. But he was a skilled screen actor and Saint is more than his match in a cookie-cutter role. Perhaps that's why she spent the next 20 years away from the big screen, taking better written roles in teleplays and mini-series.
More to Life Than Cinema
Press profiles of Eva Marie Saint tend to focus primarily on her feature roles. However, she has spent much more of her career on stage and television than on film sets. For example, she appeared in a dozen plays between 1971-2005, with husband Jeffrey Hayden directing her in Summer and Smoke (1973), Desire Under the Elms (1974), The Fatal Weakness (1976), Candida (1977), Duet For One (1982), The Country Girl (1986), Death of a Salesman (1994), and Touch the Names (2005).
Following a 10-year absence, Saint returned to television to play Woodrow Wilson's wife, Edith, in regular collaborator Delbert Mann's The First Woman President (1974). She then received back-to-back Emmy nominations for How the West Was Won (1977) and Taxi!!! (1978). The first was a four-part mini-series spun off from the 1962 feature of the same name that had been co-directed by John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, and Richard Thorpe, while the second was an hour-long two-hander, in which Martin Sheen co-stars with Saint as a cab driver and his opinionated passenger. All three should be available on disc, but TV-movies are so unfashionable among film fans that they rarely get released.
Saint was paired with Jason Robards in A Christmas to Remember (1978), Breaking Home Ties (1987), and My Antonia (1995), and with Hal Holbrook in When Hell Was in Session (1979) and I'll Be Home For Christmas (1988) before being reunited with Karl Malden in Fatal Vision (1984). Having guested as a journalist in Philip Leacock's The Curse of King Tut's Tomb (1980), Saint did a couple of 1983 episodes of The Love Boat (1977-86), as Aunt Helena Georgelos, prior to playing Beatrice Ayer Patton opposite George C. Scott, who was reprising the role for which he had spurned an Oscar in The Last Days of Patton (1986), which was directed, like Love Leads the Way (1984), by Delbert Mann.
She popped up in six episodes as Virginia, the mother of Cybill Shepherd's character, Maddie Hayes, in the ratings-topping crime series Moonlighting (1985-89), which co-starred Bruce Willis as David Addison. After drawing five blanks, Saint finally won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress as Lil Van Degan Altemus in the mini-series, People Like Us (1990), which was released the same year that she played Marilyn, the wife of murder victim Leon Klinghoffer (Burt Lancaster) in Alberto Negrin's Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair, which boasted a score by Ennio Morricone.
By this stage, Saint had returned to cinema to play Lorraine Basner, who strives to referee between husband Max (Jackie Gleason) and son David (Tom Hanks) in Garry Marshall's Nothing in Common (1986). However, her performance as Mother Saint-Raphael in John Bailey's Mariette in Ecstasy (1996) has barely been seen since premiering in 2019 after it was impounded because the production company went bankrupt.
Back in TVLand, Saint reunited with Rod Taylor to essay Caroline Lord in Michael Miller's take on Danielle Steel's Palomino (1991). She took a first-class berth as Hazel Foley in Robert Lieberman's three-part drama, Titanic (1996), before guesting in 50 Years: The Best of Hollywoood (1998) and playing Joanna, the mother of producer Roz Doyle (Peri Gilpin) in the 1999 'Our Parents, Ourselves' episode of Frasier (1993-2004).
Continuing to select her roles judiciously, Saint played Franca, the mother of divorced Italian socialite Kuki Gallmann (Kim Basinger) in Hugh Hudson's biopic, I Dreamed of Africa (2000). Having paid tribute to an old friend in Cary Grant: A Class Apart (2004), she was next seen as Lola, the 30-year estranged mother of world-weary Westerns actor Howard Spence (Sam Shepard), in Wim Wenders's underrated drama, Don't Come Knocking (2005), which features fine supporting turns from Jessica Lange, Sarah Polley, and Tim Roth, who wrote a scene simply so he could say that he had acted with Eva Marie Saint. Ironically, she had similarly refused to do the picture unless Shepard and Wenders rewrote the ending, which they promptly did.
AnnaSophia Robb, Jeff Daniels, and Cicely Tyson could all say they had co-starred with Saint after Wayne Wang cast her as Miss Franny Block, the eccentric librarian with a fount of stories including one about a book-curious bear in Because of Winn-Dixie (2005), which was adapted from a bestselling children's novel by Kate DiCamillo. Shortly afterwards, Saint made the boldest choice of her late career, when she agreed to play Martha, the adoptive Smallville mother of Clark Kent (Brandon Routh), in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (2006), which also included a computer-generated posthumous cameo from Marlon Brando that recycled footage from his performance as Jor-El in Richard Donner's Superman (1978).
Another hiatus followed before Saint did her first animated voiceover, as Katara, in six episodes of The Legend of Korra (2012-14), which followed on from the Nickelodeon cartoon series, Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-07), and M. Night Shyamalan's live-action feature, The Last Airbender (2010). However, she has not been seen on screen since playing Willa, the older version of the sister of dying consumptive Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay) in the debuting Akiva Goldsman's romantic fantasy, A New York Winter's Tale (2014).
On Christmas Eve 2016, Saint lost her 90 year-old husband, and decided to retire from acting. She has subsequently conducted the odd interview and received a standing ovation when she presented the Oscar for Best Costume Design at the 90th Academy Awards in March 2018. Saint has even tried her hand at podcasting, joining Marisa Tomei in 'The Bus Ride', a 2021 entry in the play series, The Pack Podcast. But she resolutely refuses to write her memoirs. 'The most depressing thing,' she claimed, 'is to go back and say me, me and me. I wake up and keep moving, that's what my mother said to do.'
She has stated that she based a lot of characters on her mother, who lived to be 91. Saint also remembers her exact motivation for most lachrymose scenes. 'I know what I used to cry,' she revealed. 'I can watch movies that I've been in, and if there's an emotional scene, I remember specifically what I was using, what I was thinking about, because I am very specific in how I work.'
When asked about modern films, she explained: 'I'm an Academy member, so I vote. And I can always find five wonderful films. I find a lot of swearing in films. And I guess that shows my age. But I also feel that where they say those words, they could just as easily have written other words. And I find that tiresome, and I just tune out.' She was once asked if she ever watches her old pictures. She nodded. 'Sometimes I do. And I think, Well, gee. You did that? Good job!'
Good job, indeed. Many happy returns, Eva Marie, and thanks for all those impeccable performances.
