If you are of a certain age, you already know what it is to lose friends and family to age. But few things drive home the passage of time quite like losing the icons of popular culture who have been there for as long as you can remember being old enough to notice.

If you are young, you are decades away from that point.

But if you are in the middle, those cultural icons of movies, music, and television are starting to leave us in real time, and today, we lost one of them: Eva Marie Saint.

For some actors, one role follows them for the rest of their lives. Eva Marie Saint had several. The actress died today at her Los Angeles home at the age of 102. She was first noticed by movie goers for her film debut in On the Waterfront which earned her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, but for generations of moviegoers, she was the poised, mysterious woman opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. In that movie released in 1959, Saint played Eve Kendall, an intelligent, composed, and enigmatic figure who kept the audience guessing about her allegiance.

Dog people, though, may remember her more fondly in a very different setting: the library in Because of Winn-Dixie. In the 2005 film, Saint played Miss Franny, the lonely librarian whose encounter with Opal and her dog opens the door to friendship. Initially, she mistakes Winn-Dixie for a bear—a misunderstanding connected to her story of an earlier, decidedly unusual library visitor. Check it out:

 

Purebred-dog people may appreciate knowing that the scruffy “stray” was actually played by five Berger Picards, also known as Picardy Shepherds. Their apparently spontaneous antics were carefully staged, according to American Humane’s production report. In the supermarket scene, padded ramps provided secure footing, and merchandise was rigged to fall only after a dog had safely passed. Making a dog look as though he was wreaking havoc, it turns out, took considerable planning.

Even Miss Franny’s remembered bear had professional assistance. A black bear named Casey performed the sequence in separate shots, and the book tossed toward him was made of Styrofoam. The trainer—not Saint—threw it

A sophisticated spy and a small-town librarian are hardly interchangeable roles. Yet both belong in remembering Saint: one for the elegance that made her unforgettable, the other for a story dog people recognize without much explanation. Sometimes a dog introduces us to precisely the people we needed to meet. RIP, Miss Eva.

Photo of a Berger Picard by Suomi Talvikuva is licensed under the CCAS 4.0 International license.