Los Angeles, USA – Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress who starred in classic Hollywood films including On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, died Tuesday, her publicist said. She was 102 years old. Over her seven-decade career, the ever-elegant Saint caught the eyes of influential filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock and Elia Kazan, building a legendary resume in film as well as television, which also earned her an Emmy. Her representative Jeff Sanderson said Saint died of natural causes at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and loved ones.
Saint’s performance in On the Waterfront was her film debut and earned her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Kazan’s crime drama with music composed by Leonard Bernstein is widely considered among the greatest films of all time, featuring an all-star cast including Marlon Brando, who also scored an Oscar for his role. The 1954 film catapulted Saint, who played the ethereal foil to Brando’s seething macho boxer, to Hollywood fame. She went on to star opposite Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s masterpiece North by Northwest.
Saint was considered a surprise choice to play a Hitchcock blonde, the double agent femme fatale who beguiles Grant. But she pulled it off, even though she never worked again with the Englishman, who was notorious for putting his leading ladies through hell and for controlling his actors to the last detail. “He worked with me from the outside in,” she later said. “My hair, my makeup, my shoes, my jewellery, my purse, my gloves, everything. And just from creating that exterior for me, he gave me the sense of a spy lady.”
Saint’s storied career also included work with director Otto Preminger, when she played opposite Paul Newman in Exodus in 1960. Two years later she was Warren Beatty’s love interest in John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down. With Hollywood at her feet, Saint “could have been a contender” for superstardom—to echo the most famous line from On the Waterfront—but instead she chose to step back to raise her family with director Jeffrey Hayden. Indeed, her eldest son, Darrell, was born just two days after she won her Oscar.
The brilliance of Saint’s incarnation of Edie, whose brother is lured to his death by the Brando character, has come to be seen by critics as the stand-out performance of a film once revered for its male roles. More than half a century later, Saint made a big-screen comeback as Superman’s adoptive mother in the 2006 blockbuster Superman Returns, when she was in her early 80s. And she was still busy into her mid-90s, playing a small part in the supernatural fantasy Winter’s Tale alongside Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe, and as a mother superior in the nun drama Mariette in Ecstasy, which came out in 2019.
But having first developed her acting chops in live television dramas, TV remained her preferred medium. She won an Emmy in 1990 for her role as a rich widow in the acclaimed miniseries People Like Us. Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, to Quaker parents whom she credited with developing her sense of discipline. She entered Bowling Green State University with plans to become a teacher but left with a degree in dramatic arts after discovering a passion for theater.
Saint trained in New York at the Herbert Berghof Studio and then the Actors Studio—the home of method acting—which was co-founded by Kazan. A rarity among Hollywood couples, she and Hayden’s marriage lasted for 65 years until his death in 2016. With two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Saint said her longevity had brought extra depth to her work. “The longer you live, the smarter you get, because you’ve been around, you’ve seen things,” she told TCM. “And that makes you a better actress.”
