About Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint has died at the splendid age of 102 and I know I’m not the only person whose immediate thought on hearing the news was not of Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront, but rather the line “She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront” from Lloyd Cole’s song ‘Rattlesnakes’. And yes, I guess I’m a wee bit nostalgic for the days when a pop songwriter could casually toss in a reference to an actress from a golden age and not expect blank looks. That said, there were only 30 years between the release of On The Waterfront and the release of ‘Rattlesnakes’. If we were to make a similar excursion into the past, we might compare a cool girl to Kelly Macdonald in Trainspotting. Has anyone done that? Ms Saint’s Oscar-winning turn was 70 years ago and if Lloyd were to gaze that far back from the mid-1980s, he may well have been singing the praises of Mae Marsh in The Birth of a Nation, which would be all kinds of awkward, as well as making me feel very tired and old. As Mr Cole also remarked, “are you ready to be heartbroken?”