Happy 100th birthday to Eva Marie Saint: 5 essential films

By turning 100 on 4 July 2024, Eva Marie Saint joins an exclusive club of centenarian Oscar winners. Among actors, only George Burns, Luise Rainer and Olivia de Havilland have previously achieved the feat, currently making Saint the earliest surviving and the oldest living Academy Award victor.

She came to films late after starting on stage and television and opted to raise a family rather than pursue a career. But, while her CV might not be extensive, Saint, who combined Hollywood glamour with Actors Studio integrity, continued to surprise with her range of roles, whether she was a junkie’s wife in A Hatful of Rain (1957); losing lovers to Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County (1957) and The Sandpiper (1965); the mother of a half-Apache son in The Stalking Moon (1968); or an adoptive parent from Smallville in Superman Returns (2006).

Director: Elia Kazan

Eva Maria Saint is synonymous with elegance. But there’s a disarming ferocity to the first scene in her Oscar-winning debut, as Edie Doyle condemns Fr Barry (Karl Malden) for hiding in his church while she demands to know who killed her longshoreman brother for testifying against mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). Ignoring her father’s misgivings, she places her trust in Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), an ex-boxer complicit in her brother’s death, and Saint’s stillness alongside Brando’s trademark twitchiness makes for a fascinating Method contrast. Lit to make a halo of her blonde hair, Saint tempers innocence with a steel that was unique for ingénues of the time.

Directors: Norman Panama and Melvin Frank

Saint is not known for comedy, but she anticipates Doris Day’s working chic, as small-towner Ethel Jankowski reinvents herself as city slicker Dunreath Henry in this sprightly farce. She’s about to marry her boss, Larry Larkin (George Sanders). But his syndicated comic strip needs perking up and she hires ex-husband Francis X. Dignan (Bob Hope) for the job. The script fizzes, as Hope and Sanders attempt to steal scenes off each other. But Saint proves a comic natural by playing it straight, as she would again in the Cold War satire The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) and Hope’s Paramount swan song, Cancel My Reservation (1972).

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Two weeks after having her second child, Saint found herself clambering over a mock-up of Mount Rushmore on a Culver City soundstage. In true Actors Studio style, she incorporated hurting her elbow into the scene, as government agent Eve Kendall would never be deterred by such a scrape. While many of Alfred Hithcock’s blondes were damsels in distress, wrong man Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is the one in peril, as Eve strives to prevent Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) from smuggling secrets. Has there ever been a better seduction line than, “It’s going to be a long night and I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started”?

Director: John Frankenheimer

Saint headlined this adaptation of a James Leo Herlihy novel, which tackled themes that seemed very adult at the time and feel reprehensibly outdated today (as with another Herlihy transfer, 1969’s Midnight Cowboy). There’s a hint of Blanche DuBois about Echo O’Brien, the 31-year-old family friend who inspires puppyish devotion in teenager Clinton Willart (Brandon De Wilde) and two-fisted lust in his scoundrel sibling, Berry-Berry (Warren Beatty). Things keep threatening to descend into seedy melodrama, but the “old maid from Toledo” remains tantalisingly elusive, as she digs herself deeper with each error of judgement. Saint would reunite with director John Frankenheimer as a chic journalist in Grand Prix (1966).

Director: George Seaton

Having played an American nurse witnessing the birth of Israel in Exodus (1960), Saint was cast as a Jewish nurse trying to prevent D-Day in this predictable but still gripping thriller. Faced with the prospect of continued abuse at Ravensbrück, Anna Hedler agrees to pretend it’s May 1950 and that she’s married to an American war hero in order to dupe abducted major Jefferson Pike (James Garner) into betraying details of the Allied invasion plan in June 1944. Rod Taylor and Werner Peters intrigue as contrastingly despicable Nazis, but Saint movingly portrays a survivor who discovers quiet courage and a reason to live from the depths of brutalised despair.