By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Eva Marie Saint scolded me the first time we met.
A few members of the press and the Oscar-winning actress had gathered around a coffee table in the Women’s Center in Hanna Hall. I placed my tape recorder in the middle of the table. This was an interview I wanted to capture in full.
Ms. Saint looked at the tape recording. “Are you recording?” Yes, I replied.
“You always ask,” she said, before saying it was fine.
The interview proceeded. She was gracious and forthright. That was her nature as I came to know over the next 17 years during which I had the good fortune to interview her several times.
Eva Marie Saint, 1946 BGSU grad, turns100 years old today.
Of course, the first time I laid eyes on her was on the screen. Not in “North by Northwest” or her Oscar-winning turn in “On the Waterfront,” her big screen debut, released the year I was born.
No, I was 13 when I saw her on a multiplex screen (at a time when multiplexes were a new development) in “Grand Prix.” It was 1967. Ms. Saint played sophisticated fashion journalist.
I was not drawn to the film because of her. I wanted to see the racing sequences that were filmed for the first time with cameras mounted on drivers’ helmets as the cars sped around the track at 150 mph.
But I was smitten by her as Yves Montand’s love interest. Rewatching the film recently, I was struck at how familiar the scene of her and Montand at a scenic overlook was. More so than any of the racing scenes.
None of this ever came up in our interviews though. Not 50 years later when I interviewed her by telephone. Ms. Saint was having something of a re-birth on the big screen, with three films in the theaters, after a six-year lull of no film roles. Not that she wasn’t working, she told me. When the movie parts didn’t appeal, she returned to the stage or television.
One of those movies was the summer blockbuster “Superman Returns.” She played the hero’s adoptive mother. Through some scheduling snafu, I ended up talking with her by telephone outside a multiplex, just having seen the movie.
The film reunited her in a way with Marlon Brando with whom she worked in “On the Waterfront.”
Brando, who’d died two years earlier, was shown in footage from an earlier “Superman” flick.
I asked Ms. Saint how Brando might have reacted to this cinematic sleight of hand. “He’d think it’s great. He’s in the film, and he didn’t have to go to work,” she said.
President Rodney Rogers got a taste of that bluntness when Ms. Saint visited most recently in 2018.
The 1946 BGSU graduate was on campus to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.
It was a bittersweet. Unlike previous visits, she was on campus without her husband of 65 years, the producer and director Jeffrey Hayden, who had died on Christmas Eve 2016.
Ms. Saint and her two grown children were staying in the presidential house during the visit. As they were about to leave to the fete, Ms. Saint took note of Rogers’ Falcon orange bowtie. As Rogers told it, she said: “Lose the orange tie. Black is classic.”
Rogers dutifully changed his neckwear.
Hayden had encouraged her, she said, to return to her alma mater to honor her mentor Lillian Gish.
English professor Ralph Wolfe, who introduced film studies to the curriculum, asked her at Gish’s request to return to campus, for the first time since her graduation, to dedicate a photography collection in the Gish Theater in Hanna Hall. The university was also planning to surprise her by giving her an honorary doctorate.
In 1953, she and Gish had starred together in “Trip to Bountiful,” first on television, then on Broadway. The next year, she made her film debut in “On the Waterfront.” A star was born. She is the oldest living Oscar winner, and the living winner who won her Academy Award the earliest.
But she at first said she couldn’t attend, so Wolfe let her in on the “surprise” degree. Still she demurred, until Hayden advised her that she should go.
Wolfe told her she’d have to pretend to be surprised when the degree was announced. “I am an actress,” Ms. Saint recalled telling him.
That was the beginning of a love affair between the actress and BGSU, where she earned a degree and such titles as May Queen and Sweater Girl. And where she discovered her passion for acting. She’d followed her sister to Bowling Green from Albany, New York, planning to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a teacher.
A member of the Delta Gamma sorority, she participated in an informal show where all the sorority sisters were clad in their pajamas. She sang “I’m Just a Girl who Can’t Say No.”
The husband of their house mother Professor Elden Smith heard her and encouraged her to try out for the stage comedy “Personal Appearance,” where she played, in a bit of foreshadowing, a Hollywood star, “a vamp,” as she characterized her role. Later she played Rosalind in “As You Like It,” her only Shakespearean role.
Now she wanted to be an actress.
She would have two theaters named for her — the original in University Hall, and, after the theater wing was razed, a black-box theater in the new Wolfe Center for the Arts. I’ve spent many an evening in both her namesake venues.
It was in the new Eva Marie Saint Theatre that Ms. Saint met with a full house of students in 2018. She was in all her glory bantering with students, and answering their questions candidly, treating them as younger colleagues.
In 2007, then student Ryan Zarecki presented her with flowers and spoke, a bit haltingly, about how she was a role model for them. She accepted the bouquet and sentiments with a hug. How many of us would have traded places with Zarecki then?
It was not always easy. In 2018, Ms. Saint told students about how after out of town tryouts she was fired from the cast of “Mister Roberts,” she was “too nice” for the role of the nurse, she was told. The role went to Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s older sister. Even condolences and words of encouragement from other cast members led by “Hank” Fonda, couldn’t console her. Riding the train home to Queens, she thought she never wanted to be that crushed again, but decided this was the price of pursuing a career.
She persisted. That led to a 75 year career in film, television, and stage.
When asked how she met her husband, she teared up, but told the tale about meeting him on the subway. He, too, was smitten and asked her out for coffee. She told him she didn’t drink coffee. He asked her again eliciting the same response. Then he asked her out for lunch. Since she did eat lunch, she said “yes.” They married several years later in 1951. She was expecting their first child when she accepted her Oscar, famously quipping that she may give birth on the podium. Their son Darrell waited, though, arriving two days later. Their daughter Laurette was born in 1958.
Being married to a director and producer allowed her to be more selective in the roles she took on, Saint said. That also allowed her to devote time to her family. Gish called her a rarity not just because of her artistry but because she was able to balance her roles as actress and wife and mother.
Ms. Saint said her husband loved BGSU as much as she did. Hayden was the focus of a visit in 1996 when he screened “Children in American Schools,” a PBS documentary which he directed.
They also performed together — A.R. Gurney’s two-person show “Love Letters’ in 2001, and a tribute to Willa Cather in 2007.
Interviewing and observing them together always seemed like a lesson in how to be married.
When she was here in 2018, she said she hadn’t entertained any work since her husband died, but she didn’t rule it out. Three years later, this pioneer in what was then the new medium of television ventured into another emerging medium, podcasting. She worked with Marisa Tomei on “The Bus Ride” episode of “The Pack Podcast.”
From my limited exposure to Ms. Saint over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised if she finds more opportunities to grace us with her artistry.
