Click for printable version
Click to send to a friend

Two of a Kind

Husband-and-wife team of Eva Marie Saint and Jeffrey Hayden team for 'Love Letters'

For Eva Marie Saint and Jeffrey Hayden, it's the perfect time in their lives to do A.R. Gurney's play, "Love Letters."

A two-character play, "Love Letters" involves the reading of love letters written between Melissa, an artist, and Andrew Makepeace Ladd, a lawyer, during a span of 50 years.

"Very young actors have done it but you have to live a certain number of years for it to make sense," says Saint, who with her husband, Hayden, perform the two-character play Saturday at the Charleston Heights Arts Center. "There are so many phases in their lives. They go through so many things. They're very different, but there's a thread of respect and love for each other that goes through it."

Saint and Hayden, a television and stage director, have been married more than 50 years and have worked on many stage productions together, including readings of stories by Willa Cather.

After all these years, they still like working together, they say.

"He's so solid on that stage," Saint says. "I really love doing these readings with him. It's a whole new experience and very fulfilling."

The fact they can work so well together on projects surprises some people, Saint says.

"Very often people say, `I don't see how you can work so closely with your husband.' Often people think in terms of working in offices or whatever, which is completely different from the creative experience. A director needs an actress and an actress needs a director, and once we start we just forget that we're husband and wife. It's always there, but you overcome that. It has the added benefit of being able to talk to each other in the middle of the night, one of us will wake up the other one and say, `I have this idea.' "

A producer friend brought the play to their attention and told them they should do it together. "We took the play home and read it to one another one weekend and said, `Bingo, this really works,' " Hayden says. " `Love Letters' says a lot about where we are at this time, in terms of going from one century to the next. I think it's a good description of life in America, of two people in love. And we love the fact it's funny."

For Saint "it's really about that first love we all have. And it doesn't always work out," she says.

The play requires that the actors just read the letters, there's no blocking, and Gurney makes specific instructions that the actors shouldn't look at each other.

"It's a challenge because actors use their whole instrument," Saint says. "But there's something about the restrictions that make you work in other directions and that makes it interesting to do."

During her career Saint has worked with some of the biggest directors -- Elia Kazan ("On the Waterfront," for which she won an Academy Award), Alfred Hitchcock ("North by Northwest"), Fred Zinnemann ("A Hatful of Rain"), Edward Dmytryk ("Raintree County"), Otto Preminger ("Exodus") and John Frankenheimer ("Grand Prix") among them.

"I was really blessed with wonderful directors, and all very different," Saint says. "But I think having gone to the Actors Studio prepared me for the differences in directors. Kazan came from the Actors Studio and I did `On the Waterfront,' my first film, with him. That segue from Actors Studio to film was in a sense wonderful because I knew the other actors, Rod Steiger and Lee J. Cobb, from the Studio, so I felt very much at home. But his style was so very different from Hitchcock, which was wonderful. At the Studio you learn that you're the instrument and you should be able to do whatever the director wants. Hitchcock gave very few directions. Things like, `Lower your voice, don't use your hands, look into Cary Grant's eyes at all times,' which wasn't too difficult. But Kazan and Zinnemann would quietly take you aside and whisper certain things and push the right emotional buttons."

Hayden has directed more than 400 hours of network shows including "In the Heat of the Night," "Magnum P.I.," "Alias Smith and Jones," "Batman" and "Leave It to Beaver."

But the one show he gets the most questions about is "The Andy Griffith Show."

"It was fun to do," Hayden says. "The stories on TV shows are different today; they're not quite oriented to problems of real life. Today the stories are a matter of life and death."

Saint says she can watch an old "Andy Griffith Show" episode and tell, without seeing the credits, whether Hayden directed it "just from the way the actors acted. There's a certain sensitivity, there was something about getting the best from the actors. He just has a style I can detect."

Jeffrey Hayden and Eva Marie Saint make their Las Vegas debut as they star in the romantic A.R. Gurney play "Love Letters" at the Charleston Heights Arts Center.