Eva Marie Saint, who was essential to some of the greatest movies ever, has died at age 102. She was an actress of uncommon versatility and depth, whose delicate beauty was most precisely described by the NYT as luminous.
I’ll always remember Eva Marie Saint for one of the sexiest movie scenes of all time, in North By Northwest, when she propositions Cary Grant in the dining car of a moving train. She won her Oscar for On the Waterfront, imbuing what could have been an unmemorable Good Girl role with passion and agency, and matching up with the charisma of Marlon Brando. Her talents extended to comedy, and she was wonderful in one of my personal favorites, the Cold War satire The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
Prioritizing a balanced family life, she made many fewer movies than she could have, but, along with Brando and Grant, she co-starred with Paul Newman, Montgomery Clift, Warren Beatty, Bob Hope, Carl Reiner, and Gregory Peck in the movies and with Jack Lemmon on the stage.
