I first encountered Eve Marie Saint in 1986. She played Lorraine Basner in Garry Marshall’s dramedy, Nothing in Common, starring a pre-superstardom Tom Hanks and a post-superstardom Jackie Gleason. Hanks plays David Basner, a self-absorbed ad man who was recently promoted at his agency. His life is just how he likes it. Fast, shallow, and with no messy entanglements. Then his mother (Lorraine) suddenly ends her marriage to Max ( Gleason) after 36 years. David’s life begins to get very complicated.
His father suffers from diabetes and has no friends and no wife to look after him. His mother is fragile and is learning that courage isn’t necessary just to leave, but also, at the age of 64, is needed to learn how to live. By no means is Nothing in Common a great movie. Like most of Garry Marshall’s films, it loves its characters a little too much, and the ending is far too tidy. But are there ever moments. Chief among them is when Lorraine comes to see Max in the hospital. His diabetes has worsened to such a degree that amputation is necessary. While Lorraine is as kind as she can be, she doesn’t skimp on letting Max have it for, well, ruining her life. What’s on the page is just fine, but it’s how Gleason, and especially Saint, inhabit the moment. For all that Lorraine says, the pain of giving so many years to an undeserving man hangs on her shoulders, and in the barely controlled anger as the words leave her mouth. When Lorraine is finished, Gleason is devastated. So was I.
That same year I saw more of Saint as she began a recurring role as Virginia Hayes, the mother of Maddie (Cybill Shepherd) on one of my then-favorite shows, Moonlighting. Saint was nothing like Lorraine as Virginia. She was confident, sharp-witted, and adept at the fast-paced comedy that made the show so good in its best years.
For me, Eve Marie Saint was a new arrival in 1986. Boy, did I have a lot to learn. Nothing in Common was Saint’s first film role in 14 years. Television had been the only place to see her from 1972 until she played Lorraine. Television is also where she got her start.
From 1947 and into 1954, the only screen to see Saint on was the small one. She appeared in several series as a guest star, but never as a lead. The stage had been more fertile ground for her to showcase her considerable talent. In 1953, Saint won rapturous reviews for her role as Thelma on Broadway in Horton Foote’s play The Trip to Bountiful. Her performance caught the eye of more than critics; it also caught the eye of Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan. Kazan was so taken with her performance that he decided to cast her in his next film, On the Waterfront, with Marlon Brando.
Brando’s legend was in full bloom in 1954. His last four films were A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, and The Wild One. He was a phenom just five years into his film career. Saint wasn’t just cast in a film with Brando; she was cast across from him as the female lead. She played Edie Doyle, a woman determined to find out who murdered her dockworker brother. In her search for the truth, she meets Terry Malloy (Brando), a former boxer and current longshoreman. The two fall in love, and Edie becomes the moral ballast in Terry’s life, making him want to be something more than he is.
Edie Doyle is not the most colorful character ever written. She’s decent, good, and unfailingly so. She could have been so boring, especially next to Brando in what would become his seminal lead role (sorry, Godfather fans). Brando was at his peak, and Saint needed to stand beside that fiery furnace of genius and hold her ground. She did more than that. She became the heart of the movie. In 1955, Saint won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Edie Doyle in On the Waterfront.
Hers was one of the great debuts in film history. And even if she never quite caught that lightning strike again, she went on to enjoy a highly admirable career. She made a film with Bob Hope in 1956 (That Certain Feeling), and the dramas A Hatful of Rain and Raintree County in 1957. The latter of which saw her share the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
Saint made one more classic film in her career: Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller North by Northwest in 1959, starring Cary Grant. As the glamorous, blonde (naturally) femme fatale Eve Kendall, entangled in a mystery with Grant’s wrongfully accused Roger Thornhill, Saint’s beauty came to the fore like never before in any project she took part in. Her swift, witty dialogue, which I first noticed in Moonlighting, was evident in North by Northwest. The film was a massive hit and is considered one of Hitchcock’s best films. I’ll take back what I said earlier. Lightning did strike twice for Saint.
Despite appearing in two masterpieces in five years, Saint never did take the next step to superstardom. She would go on to star alongside Paul Newman in Exodus 1960), Warren Beatty in All Fall Down (1962), Taylor and Richard Burton in The Sandpiper (1965), and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming and Grand Prix (both in 1966). Only the last two films on that list were hits. Russians was a large ensemble piece, and her role in Grand Prix is ostensibly a girlfriend part to a race car driver. Despite the twin success of both films in 1966, neither gave her much of a lift.
Saint’s last lead performance on film came in 1970 in the romantic comedy Loving, with co-star George Segal. She played the long-suffering wife of Segal’s philandering husband, who finally sees him for who he is in the film’s climax. Loving was not a hit, despite winning strong notices from Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael. Both singled her out for her comedic and dramatic dexterity. A failed second film with Bob Hope followed in 1972. After that, Saint became a television actress for nearly a decade and a half.
Emmy nominations would come for the miniseries How the West Was Won (1977) and Taxi!! (1978). In 1990, Saint would win an Emmy for her role in the miniseries People Like Us.
Saint worked steadily from 1990 to 2006, with her most significant role being Martha Kent in the underrated Superman Returns. A handful of roles followed until Saint effectively retired from on-camera work.
It’s funny how movies and the actors in them come to you. So much is dependent on when and how you come to them. I came to Eve Marie Saint in a largely forgotten footnote in the careers of Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason. If anything, Nothing in Common’s greatest distinction is being Gleason’s last performance. But that’s not the distinction of that modest film for me. No, for me, it’s Eve Marie Saint facing down a giant in a hospital room and snatching the scene from him. I had no idea it wasn’t the first time, but I soon learned better.
Eve Marie Saint died on October 6, 2026. She was 102 years old.
