She said she owed a lot to Kovacs, as another producer on the show had initially vetoed Kovacs's decision to hire her. In interviews, Loden said, "Ernie felt sorry for me" and gave her another job as a stunt sidekick, rolling around in a rug or getting hit in the face with a pie. In 1960, Loden appeared in Elia Kazan's film "Wild River" as Montgomery Clift's secretary. She was perhaps better known for her role in "Splendor in the Grass" (1961), in which she played Warren Beatty's sister. She famously portrayed Maggie, a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe, in Kazan's Lincoln Center Repertory Company stage production of "After the Fall" (1964), which was written by Monroe's former husband, playwright Arthur Miller. Loden received a Tony award for best actress for her performance in "After the Fall" as well as an annual award of the Outer Circle, an organization of writers who covered Broadway for national magazines. "After the Fall" reviews called Loden the "new Jean Harlow" and a "blonde bombshell." Loden married her first husband, film and television producer and film distributor Larry Joachim, in the 1950s, and they had a son, Marco. After an affair while they were both married to other people, Loden married film director Elia Kazan, who was 23 years her senior, in 1966. She had another son, Leo, with Kazan, and though estranged and considering divorce, they were still married at the time of her death from breast cancer at the age of 48. Kazan could be contemptuous when describing his relationship with Loden. In his autobiography, "Elia Kazan: A Life", he revealed his desire and inability to control her. Kazan wrote about Loden "with a mix of affection and patronization, emphasizing her sexuality and her backcountry feistiness." In a "condescending" way, Kazan bemoaned that Loden had depended on her "sexual appeal" to get ahead and that he was afraid of "losing her." But Kazan was also, in his words, "protective" of Loden. Her acting career on film had a troubled history. Her first major film role was to be in the Frank Perry-directed "The Swimmer" starring Burt Lancaster, but during post-production there was a dispute about the scene between producer Sam Spiegel and the film's writer-director team, the Perrys.