Eva Marie Saint: Her Independence Is Blessed : Acting: A Christmas experience long ago forced her to examine the reel world. She decided to save part of herself for real life.

By RICK DU BROW

March 28, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES TELEVISION WRITER

“I was born on the Fourth of July,” says past Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint. “I’m independent.”

Indeed. In a long and distinguished career marked by quality rather than quantity, Saint, now a grandmother who remains glamorous at 70, has chosen her spots carefully.

One of those spots is on tap Wednesday when Saint stars with Jason Robards, Neil Patrick Harris and Elina Lowensohn in a TV-movie adaptation of Willa Cather’s “My Antonia” on cable’s USA Network.

The gentle story focuses on the relationship that develops between a Nebraska farm boy (Harris) and a girl (Lowensohn) from an immigrant farm family. Saint and Robards portray Harris’ grandparents.

“Aren’t the two young people just beautiful?” says Saint, sitting on the couch of her fourth-floor condo in a Wilshire Corridor high-rise.

Perhaps best known to the young TV generation as the mother of Cybill Shepherd in “Moonlighting,” Saint burst onto the movie scene opposite Marlon Brando in 1954 in “On the Waterfront,” for which she won an Academy Award as best supporting actress.

A show business survivor from radio and television’s early live dramas, her other films have ranged from “North by Northwest” to “Raintree County,” “A Hatful of Rain,” “Exodus” and “Nothing in Common,” blended with stage work that includes readings of Cather’s works with her director-husband, Jeffrey Hayden.

In addition to “Moonlighting,” her TV credits include “Fatal Vision,” “People Like Us” and other periodic specials.

“Now,” she says of her role selection, “my yardstick is: ‘Would I be proud for my grandchildren to see this?’ I’m serious.

“I guess I want to go down with respect. I don’t have to make every dollar in the world. I don’t have to live like a very rich person. I have all the things I need, starting with my beautiful family and my grandchildren.

“I like the independence. And the things (scripts) I’ve read are kind of raunchy. I’m not a prude, I hope, but there are things that would not make me proud. Now ‘My Antonia’--I feel very proud of that.”

She’s certainly not a prude, because two of her favorite television shows are NBC’s often-racy comedy series “Mad About You” and “Seinfeld.”

“Those two I love,” says the actress.

She also loved the late Jessica Tandy, who died at 85 in 1994, and hopes she can move into the kind of roles the revered actress played in her later years.

“Yes, eventually. Like ‘The Gin Game.’ And I loved ‘Driving Miss Daisy.’ And wasn’t she wonderful in ‘Nobody’s Fool’? Jessica was an idol of mine--and Hume, too (Hume Cronyn, Tandy’s husband). We lived at their apartment at the Wyndham Hotel in New York when I was there doing ‘Duet for One.’ ”

There is, in fact, the possibility that Saint and Robards may do “The Gin Game,” she says. “We hope so. We’d like to do it on the stage for five or six weeks and then put it on film for one of the networks.”

It was her stage work in “The Trip to Bountiful” that led to her role in “On the Waterfront.” And her early live TV credits gave her rare experience in the new medium as well.

“I did ‘Middle of the Night’ with E.G. Marshall. That was beautiful. And ‘Our Town’ with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. And ‘June Moon.’ I did hundreds of live shows,” she says.

In films, her impressive list of leading men also included Montgomery Clift, Warren Beatty, Gregory Peck, Bob Hope and Richard Burton. Yet even with her earlier movie impact, she has rarely seemed part of the Hollywood social scene--which she admits was, and is, another act of independence.

“We’ve been out here 39 years,” she says, “but we’re not in the swing of things a lot because we have a house in Santa Barbara, in Montecito, overlooking the sea. It was the smartest thing we ever did. We built it about 30 years ago and go up every weekend. I just can’t get a fix on Los Angeles--you can’t take Greenwich Village out of the girl, I guess--but I love Santa Barbara.”

Does she find it difficult to live a normal life in L.A.?

“I don’t think so. People say, ‘My God, you’ve been married 42, 43 years--that’s so unusual.’ I really don’t wake up every morning and say, ‘Well, now, isn’t this unusual? I’m sleeping with the same man after 43 years.’ I do say that you work at marriage. It just doesn’t happen.”

Although Saint fit in naturally with the witty, up-tempo style of “Moonlighting,” her film image over the years was that of a fragile, vulnerable but inwardly strong woman. Alfred Hitchcock was one of the few directors imaginative enough to cast her against type in the espionage thriller “North by Northwest.”

“That’s right,” she says. “He’d say to me, ‘Eva Marie, I don’t want you to play any more of those black-and-white, sink-to-sink movies.’ I would say, ‘What does that mean?’ He would say, ‘The women in the audience dress up, their husbands are going to take them out on the town--and they see you back at the sink.’ But I never played a sexy spy lady after that, did I?”

Being tough to pigeonhole has, in fact, been a trademark of Saint’s career.

“I had an agent once where I ended up crying a few times because he didn’t understand that when I got back from doing something, I didn’t want to go off and do something else right away. I had two small children.

“I couldn’t take all those jobs, and he would say, ‘Well, you’ll never become a super, super star.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess I just don’t want to be a super, super star.’ ”

A Christmas happening when she was working in the TV series “One Man’s Family” more than four decades ago helped set her course, she says. An older actress in the show would invite the cast to her home in a hotel during the holidays.

“She lived alone,” says Saint. “All of us wanted to be with our own friends and families. I remember one Christmas, just looking at her, thinking, ‘She doesn’t have anyone.’ Something happened to me that night. I just heard something in me say, ‘This isn’t what you want. You don’t want to give up everything.’ And I don’t think that you have to give up everything.”

* “My Antonia” airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on cable’s USA channel.