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Windsor Star (12/May/1990) - Class of Hollywood going strong

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Class of Hollywood going strong

Eva Marie Saint and Jean Simmons are two of Hollywood's classiest and most acclaimed film actresses.

Saint received an Oscar for best supporting actress for her first film, the legendary On the Waterfront (1954). Among her leading men are such heartthrobs as Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and the late Montgomery Clift and Cary Grant.

The British-born Simmons received the first of her two Oscar nominations more than 40 years ago, when she was still a teenager, for Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. Arriving in Hollywood in the early '50s with her first husband, actor Stewart Granger, she starred in such acclaimed films as The Robe (1953), Elmer Gantry (1960) and Spartacus (1960).

Saint and Simmons both star in People Like Us, a two-part miniseries based on Dominick Dunne's best-seller, which airs Sunday and Monday (9 p.m. Detroit's Channel 4 and Kitchener's Channel 42).

Simmons plays the disabled ex-wife of a famous writer (Ben Gazzara), whose daughter is murdered by her psychopathic lover. Saint is a wealthy self-centred woman who disowns her daughter (Teri Polo) when she marries a Jewish man and fails to acknowledge the fact that her son (Gary Frank) is dying of AIDS.

The two actresses spoke in separate interviews about their Hollywood lives.

Before coming to Hollywood in the mid '50s, Saint acted in live TV dramas in New York. The TV show that changed her life professionally and personally was Horton Foote's A Trip to Bountiful, in which she played a young woman who befriends an elderly woman (Lillian Gish) in a bus station. "I learned so much from her," Saint said. " I noticed she was the first one at rehearsal and the last to leave."

Trip to Bountiful was such a hit it became a Broadway play starring both actresses.

"One night when I left the stage, there was this huge ring of applause," Saint said. "As I walked off, I thought, 'What did I do differently?' What happened was as I left the stage, Lillian just turned her back to the audience and just waved to my character and just took that audience right with me. That was such a gift."

Saint and Gish have remained close. "She writes the sweetest notes," she said. "They're always on note paper decorated with bunnies and flowers. She puts about five lines on the note. She gets so much in five lines. I have saved every one of her letters."

Elia Kazan and Sam Spiegel, the director and producer of On the Waterfront, caught a performance of Bountiful and cast Saint in their movie. "I didn't have to take a screen test," she said. "I have never tested for a part."

Not even for Alfred Hitchcock. The master of suspense simply had lunch with Saint and then cast her as the cool, sophisticated blonde who falls for Cary Grant in 1959's North by Northwest.

"I started filming that three weeks after Laurette (her daughter) was born," Saint said. "I had only gained about 21 pounds and was back to my normal weight. Helen Rose had designed the dresses, and none of them worked. (Hitchcock) didn't like her creations at all. So he took me to Bergdorf Goodman's in New York. He said, 'Eva Marie, we are going to bring out the models and pick whatever you like.' I loved a dress with red roses and he loved that. It was $2,000, which was expensive back then. It's expensive even now. From then on, I called him my Sugar Daddy."

Though Saint has only made one feature film in the past 15 years (Nothing in Common), she is working constantly on TV. It was lack of good film roles that led her back to the medium in which she started her career. "As I got older, there weren't that many roles," she said matter-of-factly. "I segued into TV and am perfectly happy."

And so is Jean Simmons. As her feature film offers began to dwindle in the late '70s, Simmons turned to TV and has kept busy in movies and miniseries, picking up an Emmy for her performance in the ABC miniseries, The Thorn Birds.

Oddly, Simmons has seen very little of her TV work. In fact, she has seen very little of her film work. "I never saw Hamlet until five or six years ago," she said. "It was on TV and my daughter Tracy said, 'Mummy, you're going to sit down and watch it.' I don't like watching myself. But it was like I was watching someone else. The kid wasn't bad considering I was somebody who had never done Shakespeare before and hated it at school because they made it so boring."

Though she has lived in the United States for four decades, Simmons said she never expected to work in Hollywood. "I came out here to get married, and I was prepared to go back to England, but Mr. Rank (British producer Arthur Rank) decided to sell me to Howard Hughes (then head of RKO)," she said. "I was newly married and in love, so I made four pictures for RKO. Never mind about them."

She had a much more pleasurable experience at MGM starring opposite Spencer Tracy in The Actress, based on Ruth Gordon's memoirs. "We were great friends, but that was the only film we made together," she said.

Simmons is set to star in NBC's new fall series Dark Shadows, based on the cult ABC daytime series of the '60s about vampires in modern-day New England. Ben Cross is playing the charismatic vampire, Barnabus Collins.

"I have been saying this for years now that I would love to play head madame vampire of whorehouse, but nobody took me seriously," she said.

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