Eva Marie Saint: the Hitchcock Blonde who outgrew the persona

Her glacial poise in North By Northwest made her a cinematic icon, but films including On the Waterfront and Loving revealed great subtlety alongside the glamour Eva Marie Saint dies aged 102 Her best films – ranked Her life in pictures ‘I’m Eve Kendall.

I’m 26 and unmarried.

Now you know everything.” Not quite everything.

That is the famously succinct introduction given in a swaying dining car in a voice creamy with insinuation.

Eve is speaking to Cary Grant’s fugitive ad man Roger Thornhill, wrongly accused of murder and hiding out from the cops on a train from New York to Chicago in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North By Northwest.

Eve is going to hide him in her compartment because she wants to have sex with him, and much later that train of theirs is to symbolically enter a tunnel.

But is that the whole story? Eve’s amazingly beautiful, enigmatic face encodes a secret.

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