Oscar-winning actor celebrated for her outstanding performances in On the Waterfront and North By Northwest

Eva Marie Saint, who has died aged 102, made a lasting impression in two outstanding American films: as Edie Doyle, the wholesome, sensitive, Catholic girl who befriends the docker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954); and as Eve Kendall, the intriguing beauty helping and hindering the pursued advertising executive (Cary Grant) in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959).

In the latter, Saint, the coolest and wittiest of the “Hitchcock blondes”, was lit so beautifully that her fair skin looked like porcelain. In the scene when they first meet in the dining car of a Chicago-bound train, Saint and Grant deliver the double-edged banter with supreme style. Assessing him, she says, “Good taste in clothes. Good taste in food.” He continues, “Good taste in women – I like your flavour.”

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.

Wyndham’s theatre, London
Grant brings shock-haired vigour as a vain novelist forced to welcome his boho children’s surprise guests in comedy of clipped social embarrassment

Hay Fever, now one of Noël Coward’s best-known and most-performed works, hasn’t always been a smash hit. British critics who found its West End debut in 1925 amusing enough nevertheless noted its lack of plot, and the first Broadway production was a flop. A critic for Vogue called it “funny in places”, which sounds like the kind of stinging putdown you’d expect from the playwright’s own hand.

A century of performances have proved the play’s lasting power, but its comic effect has always lain less in the words as written than their delivery – it is, after all, about a family that is “artificial to the point of lunacy”. At their centre is diva Judith Bliss, who has retired from the stage to take up the role of country hostess. When she, her husband and their self-consciously bohemian children Sorel and Simon all invite surprise guests for the weekend, the unfortunate attendees find themselves embroiled in a self-serving drama of exquisite embarrassment.

The actors are working together for the first time ever, in Noël Coward’s comedy Hay Fever. Backstage, there’s no stopping their tales of skinny-dipping, fat-shaming and warring co-stars

Richard E Grant: Despite our vast combined vintage, our paths have never crossed before, have they?

Christine Baranski: Regrettably not. We could have had some good fun a few decades ago. A girl could have got into some real trouble. But here we are, and now we’re the veterans. You’re among the great character actors, popping up delightfully in so many things and always being spot-on.

The actor gobbles up food, roars with glee and finds himself deeply moved in this four-part travelogue inspired by the journey of Homer’s hero. It’s a real success of a show

Here comes Richard E Grant, pounding towards us in his tiny leather jacket as he gesticulates wildly at his cobbled surrounds. “Wow,” he gasps. “Look at that.” We look at that. It’s Malta. Specifically, Malta’s Grand Harbour: a sobbingly beautiful gateway to the Mediterranean and the sun-blessed starting line for Richard E Grant’s Very Modern Odyssey, a four-part travelogue “inspired by Homer’s hero” in which the veteran actor traces Odysseus’s “incredible journey” while wearing a succession of increasingly voluminous linen trousers.

Said tracing is not, however, an exact science. This is not one of those awful celebrity things in which our noble hero arms himself with set squares and a scholastic scowl before setting sail on a “voyage” to uncover “the truth”.

The leads are the most watchable thing in this raucous period yarn about a grimy pair of status-obsessed nobles

Black-belt performances from Claire Foy and Richard E Grant put some vim and vigour into this haranguingly one-note and unidirectional period romp of the raucously bewigged and be-poxed 18th century. It’s written and directed by American film-maker Peter Glanz, who gives us candlelit interiors like a knockoff Barry Lyndon, and periodic deafening orchestral stabs with a touch of Amadeus as furious people in costume storm down corridors. But Grant and Foy are always there, selling it hard and there are one or two nice lines.

They play Sir Chauncey and Lady Savage, who are living in a vast crumbling country estate: he’s a parvenu, an adventurer, a lover of the new Hanover dispensation who loathes Jacobites, but fundamentally a social alpinist who married for money and took his wife’s noble name. She was entranced by his roguish ways and she forgave him everything but is, however, having an affair with the footman, Halifax (Jack Farthing), while he is carrying on with the maid, Dorothy (Bel Powley). Richard McCabe and Vicki Pepperdine play two ghastly neighbours with dodgy teeth: the only people who will associate with them.

A misogynist is made to learn the error of his ways in this painfully dated and embarrassingly star-packed sexism comedy

In its attempt to become a one-stop shop for just about every form of nostalgia possible, Netflix has now decided to revive the dreadful British comedy of the 2000s. Films such as Sex Lives of the Potato Men, Three and Out, Fat Slags and Lesbian Vampire Killers saw creatives boldly stand up to Hollywood and declare that whatever they could do, the UK film industry could do it 10 times worse.

The all-deciding algorithm has somehow deemed it necessary for a return to that cursed era with the release of Ladies First, a broad and chintzy new comedy that would have felt old hat even back then. It’s an excruciatingly unfunny high-concept thought experiment, imagining a world with flipped gender politics, that’s far too happy with itself and what it’s allegedly achieving to be passed off as just some charming throwback. Like the other misfires it recalls, it’s also a criminal waste of talent, a murderers’ row of actors who hopefully got paid handsomely for the embarrassment of this whiffing up their IMDb pages.

Second season of BBC hit has attracted one of the most high-profile casts ever assembled for a reality TV show

If it were any other show, the sight of the comedian Alan Carr sobbing under the burden of his dishonesty may have been enough to put off any celebrity thinking about accepting a place in the perilous Traitors’ castle.

Yet the second season of The Celebrity Traitors, being filmed at its now famous Highlands retreat, has managed to attract one of the most high-profile casts ever assembled for a reality TV show.

Actors Richard E Grant, Michael Sheen and Bella Ramsey among star-studded cast hoping for victory as BBC’s hit spin-off series returns to screens

Considering the Traitors is a game of murderous treachery played out in a castle, the Shakespearean actors in the cast of the new celebrity spin-off series should be well set.

Oscar-nominated Richard E Grant, acclaimed actor Michael Sheen and The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey will be among the thespians vying for victory this year, all of whom have the Bard on their CV.

When it comes to scandal, seeing is believing – which is why these images caused such a stir

Words can tell a story, but it’s pictures that will make you believe in it. Such is the power of a photograph; the ability to strip away illusions, to illuminate something hidden, and sometimes force us to accept unpalatable truths. When it comes to scandal, seeing is believing – occasionally even to the point that a picture changes the course of history.

How might life have been different for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had he not been photographed clutching the midriff of the 17-year-old girl he would later claim he had never met? Without this haunting triptych of the former prince, the late Virginia Giuffre and Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer, Ghislaine Maxwell, hovering in the background, there would have been nothing physical to connect the then prince with a trafficking victim. Though for years Andrew’s friends insisted that the photograph must have been doctored, buried within the Epstein files recently released by the US Department of Justice is a note from Maxwell that appears to confirm it is real.

The actor has played many classic roles and his love of film is clear in his garden, from the Saltburn proscenium arch to the pergola where Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd have partied the night away

Step into Richard E Grant’s garden in Richmond, London, and you’ll be met with a rather unconventional sight. Instead of the daffodils and tulips you’d usually find in an English garden at this time of year, Grant’s space is full of props and decorations from the films he’s starred in – from Saltburn to Carrie Cracknell’s 2022 adaptation of Persuasion.

After any job, he says, “I go to the production department and try and buy or bribe my way” to get pieces to put in his garden. The space has, until now, been a private spot for Grant to entertain his actor friends. But now he has shared it with the world as part of the Royal Horticultural Society’s new podcast, Roots. I took a look around it – here are some of the weird and wonderful things that can be found there.

This Sunday, casting directors will be honoured at the Oscars for the first time. Why has it taken so long?

‘It’s unbelievable how much information we hold about actors,” says Kelly Valentine Hendry. “We have our ears to the ground. We know about bad behaviour. We know about things that actors require in order to give a better performance …” Casting directors, she says, “monitor all that, all the time, from the shadows”.

Amid the A-list glitz of this weekend’s Oscars, casting directors will step from the shadows into the spotlight as the Academy Awards’ inaugural casting prize is presented. These quietly pivotal yet hitherto almost invisible figures are experts in spotting and allocating talent, and navigating actors’ and directors’ sometimes challenging temperaments.

After Guardian writers shared their choices, readers responded with picks from films including Withnail and I, Emily the Criminal and Chopper

The fact that he manages to save a kid’s life while remaining a sweary alcoholic without an ounce of dignity and self-respect … is positively heartwarming. GusCairns

Crowe is wittily cast as the pompous Nazi in this tale from behind the scenes at the Nuremberg trials, but Malek is deeply silly as army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley

Here is a movie promising the juiciest of real-life stories from history. Before the Nazi war-crime trials at Nuremberg that started in November 1945, an obscure US army psychiatrist called Dr Douglas Kelley was ordered to interview the prisoners, chief among whom was Hermann Göring. This was supposedly to establish their fitness for trial, but was really intended to gain inside information as to how they would conduct their defence. Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it’s the best he’s been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans.

But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley: an eye-rolling, enigmatic-smiling, scenery-nibbling hamfest which makes it look as if Malek is auditioning for the role of Hitler in The Producers. Leo Woodall plays the American army translator Howie Triest, Michael Shannon is the US chief prosecutor Robert H Jackson and Richard E Grant is British Tory MP David Maxwell-Fyfe who (for all that his postwar career as home secretary was notorious for the homophobic persecution, which helped drive Alan Turing to his grave), is actually shown to be crucial in cross-examining the Nazis. All of these actors do their best, but the figure of Kelley himself is a ridiculous cartoon.