Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning star best known for playing a New Jersey dockworker’s grieving sister in the Elia Kazan drama “On the Waterfront” and an elegant government agent in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest,” died Tuesday. She was 102.
Saint’s death was confirmed by her representative, Jeff Sanderson, who attributed it to natural causes and said she was “surrounded by family and loved ones.”
Saint was one of the last surviving luminaries of the Golden Age of Hollywood, revered by generations of cinephiles for the understated complexity of her most celebrated performances.
In a career that started in the early 1950s and spanned more than seven decades, Saint appeared in 20 feature films. She was a prolific television performer, collecting five Emmy nominations and winning one for the 1990 miniseries “People Like Us.”
Saint collaborated with some of the most fabled performers and filmmakers of the classical era. She co-starred with Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck and Elizabeth Taylor in movies from giants like Hitchcock, Kazan, Vincente Minnelli and Otto Preminger.
The entertainment industry changed dramatically during Saint’s life, but she persevered through each new chapter with a smile and a sense of humor, even appearing as Clark Kent’s adoptive mother in “Superman Returns,” released in 2006.
“You know how to stay young? Go with the flow,” Saint told Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in 2014.
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Eva Marie Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey. She started acting while she was a student at Bowling Green State University, graduating in 1946. She then launched her career as a radio actor in New York City and took classes at the city’s famed Actors Studio.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Saint appeared on small-screen programs such as “Actors Studio” and “The Prudential Family Playhouse.” She was applauded for her turn in a 1953 televised version of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” starring Lillian Gish, an icon of silent cinema.
Gish proved to be one of the key mentors in Saint’s young life. In an interview with TCM, Saint recalled what Gish would say to younger actors fretting about their future: “It’s today and tomorrow, and don’t get cranky.”
In 1951, Saint married Jeffrey Hayden, who went on to become a prolific television director and producer. (He died in 2016 at the age of 90.)
Saint’s big-screen breakout came when she was cast in Kazan’s “On the Waterfront,” now considered one of the landmarks of midcentury American drama.
She played Edie Doyle, sister of a slain Hoboken dockworker and the conflicted love interest of washed-up prize fighter Terry Malloy (“I could’ve been a contender!”), played by Marlon Brando.
Brando, as she later recalled, seemed at once “really adorable” and somewhat intimidating during the production of “Waterfront.” He was possessed of such an intense acting talent, she told TCM, that “I felt that he could see right through me.”
Saint’s feature film debut earned her an Academy Award for best supporting actress at the ceremony in 1955, two days before she gave birth to her first child. Frank Sinatra called out her name, and the visibly pregnant Saint took the stage to deliver a brief acceptance speech.
“I may have the baby right here,” she said with a laugh. “But I would love to thank Elia Kazan, and Sam Spiegel, Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Boris Kaufman, all the longshoremen. Thank you.”
The same year she won an Oscar, Saint was nominated for an Emmy for her work in the TV version of Paddy Chayefsky’s play “The Middle of the Night.” The following year she received another Emmy nod for her turn in a TV musical production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”
Saint’s film career flourished, too. She co-starred with Bob Hope in “That Certain Feeling,” picked up a Golden Globe nod for her role in Fred Zinnemann’s addiction drama “A Hatful of Rain” and appeared alongside Montgomery Clift in Edward Dmytryk’s “Raintree County.”
But then came arguably the best-known part of Saint’s screen career: Eve Kendell, a steely double agent who gets swept up in a convoluted espionage plot and romance with a dashing Madison Avenue executive (Cary Grant) in “North by Northwest.”
In the role, Saint was asked to convey equal parts competence and vulnerability, seductiveness and fear. She pulled it off with aplomb. In the film’s deliriously suspenseful climax, Eve tries to fend off villainous operatives atop Mount Rushmore and nearly falls off the mountain.
In actuality, the actor raced around on a 30-foot recreation of Mount Rushmore inside a Culver City soundstage. Still, the action set piece was not exactly easy to shoot.
“I had just given birth two weeks before to our second child,” Saint recalled in a 2000 interview with the Oklahoman. “So, there I was, climbing around. I thought: Oh my, I have no fear of heights, but I don’t climb mountains.”
But then she realized she “wasn’t nervous, and Cary was older than I, and I thought: Oh, if he can do it, I can do it,” she told the publication.
In the years to come, Saint tried her hand at various genres, from the historical epic (Preminger’s “Exodus”) and domestic melodrama (Minnelli’s “The Sandpiper”) to a memorable Cold War comedy (“The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!”).
In the 1970s, Saint reduced her feature film commitments and started to appear more frequently in intimate made-for-television films and miniseries, including “The First Woman President” and “Fatal Vision.”
In an interview with The Associated Press published in 2014, Saint said she continued to savor the challenge of acting but envied the plum roles handed to veteran British performers such as Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.
“We don’t have quite that attitude in Hollywood,” she said. “You reach a certain age and you’re so proud that you’re walking and breathing and loving and working and all of that at 90.”
Saint’s last big-screen credit was in the 2014 fantasy romance “Winter’s Tale,” co-starring Colin Farrell and Jessica Brown Findlay, of “Downton Abbey.” Saint recalled that Farrell gifted her five dozen roses on the final day of shooting.
Saint’s husband, Jeffrey Hayden, died in December 2016. They were married for 65 years. She is survived by her two children, Darrell and Laurette; four grandchildren, Eli, Tyler, Molly, and Stella; and two great grandchildren, Arlo and Finley.
