A Former Greenwich Village Saint Turns 100!

By Richard Eric Weigle

EVA MARIE SAINT at the Premiere of Winter’s Tale. Photo credit: Greg Pace.

That Saint, to whom I am referring, is our oldest living Academy and Emmy Award winner, and oldest living Hitchcock Blonde, Eva Marie Saint, who will turn 100 years old on July 4th. Having outlived her husband of 65 years, director and producer, Jeffrey Hayden, and all of her male co-stars who were her love interests (except for Warren Beatty), she is the golden girl who has had and has it all.

After graduating from Bowling Green University in Ohio in 1946, she moved to New York to become an actress and soon became well-known on Broadway and in television. She appeared in so many live television shows that critics dubbed her the “Helen Hayes of Television.” Some of her most memorable early roles were in A Trip To Bountiful with Lillian Gish, Middle Of The Night with E.G. Marshall and a musical version of Our Town with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. During this time she lived in Greenwich Village mostly at 26 West 9th Street where she commuted to Hoboken with Marlon Brando every day to film 1954’s On The Waterfront, her first film and the one for which she won an Academy Award. Being nine months pregnant, she accepted her award here in New York where she famously stated, “I may have the baby right here.” She had the baby two days later, but did not succumb to pressure to name him Oscar. Eva Marie and Brando were both rewarded with Oscars that night and are credited by many for injecting more realism and truth into American acting.

Soon Hollywood beckoned and Eva Marie and her husband reluctantly left New York. Moving to California in 1955, she may be the only actress ever to arrive in Hollywood as an Academy Award winner which meant that she never had to do a screen test or audition for a role. It seemed as though every director and producer wanted to work with her. Because of this, she was able to be very selective in her choices, always putting her family first. Soon their daughter was born and Eva continued to find at least one project a year that interested her. Some of her most memorable films during that time were A Hatful Of Rain, Raintree County, and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North By Northwest with Cary Grant.

She became known for her subtle acting, and for bringing emotional depth and nuance to seemingly delicate women possessing great inner strength. In the 1960s she made important films such as Exodus, 36 Hours, Grand Prix and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.

In the 1970s she refused to lend her name to violent disaster films and returned to the stage and to television where she found roles expressing the human condition that were more appealing to her, most notably Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke and Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under The Elms, both performed at The Kennedy Center and around the country. During the next five decades, Eva Marie Saint navigated effortlessly between stage, television, films, and voice-over work. She even acted in podcasts and radio plays at the age of 97, making her 75 year career one of the longest of any American actress and matching the 75 year career of her longtime friend and mentor Lillian Gish. Eva Marie Saint is a national treasure, an actress who has always conducted herself with class and grace in her professional and personal life. She has two stars on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk Of Fame, one for television and one for film, an Oscar, an Emmy, numerous stage awards and the respect of everyone who knows her. In her later years she worked with the likes of Tom Hanks, Sam Shepard and Colin Farrell who stated that working with Eva Marie Saint was one of the highlights of his career. The late host of Turner Classic Movies, Robert Osborne, called her the “nicest woman in Hollywood” and the current host, Ben Mankiewicz, calls her “the kindest.”

So it is only fitting that this November, 70 years after starring in On The Waterfront and living here in The Village, that The Greenwich Village Film Festival will honor our former neighbor with a Lifetime Achievement Award. For me, as one of the organizers of the Festival, it is a dream come true. Starting out as a fan in the 1950s and slowly becoming her friend, then her official archivist and finally, a producer of three of her documentaries, the latest being one of her final credits, Broadway: Beyond The Golden Age, knowing her is one of the great joys of my life.

Happy Birthday Miss Saint. You continue to make us all proud.