Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint has died at the age of 102. I had no idea she'd been around for over a century. It's nice to see she wasn't kicked out of her home in Los Angeles before she died. Unlike some actresses of her age, maybe she still had a good income because her last major film role was in 2014's Winter's Tale and she played Martha Kent in Superman Returns in 2005. But of course, she's best known for being in two of the greatest movies of all time, North by Northwest and On the Waterfront.

I'll admit, I'm not a big Eva Marie Saint fan. I love both of those movies, particularly North by Northwest, but comparing her performances in the two films really highlights how On the Waterfront's director, Elia Kazan, deserved his reputation for getting great performances out of actors. Plus, she was partnered with Marlon Brando in that movie, and I think his performance was so startlingly natural it likely provoked natural responses from her. It's no wonder she won an Oscar for On the Waterfront. So it's puzzling that she's so rigid in North by Northwest. It may have been due to that film's director, Alfred Hitchcock's, infamous coldness with his actors, and her performance isn't so different from Kim Novak's in Vertigo the year previous. But as with Novak, the impression of a repressed and emotionally unavailable woman kind of works when analysing the film.