Eva Marie Saint, Oscar-Winning Star of On the Waterfront, Dies at 102

I just realized something. I'm older than the Academy. Plus four months, maybe five. I'm very proud of that. Just keep moving. That was Eva Marie Saint speaking to an enthusiastic audience at the 90th Academy Awards ceremony in 2018, appearing at the age of 93 to present the Oscar for Best Costume Design. As the graceful star of Hollywood's golden age, Saint passed away on Tuesday at the age of 102. Her publicist, Jeff Sanderson, stated that she died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and loved ones.

Born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in upstate New York, she attended Bowling Green State University in Ohio with plans to become a schoolteacher. After a drama professor suggested she try out for a school play, she landed the lead in Personal Appearance and switched her major to dramatics. Moving to New York City, she trained at the American Theatre Wing and with Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio and working as an NBC page.

From Live Television Origins to Academy Award Glory

Saint established herself during the formative years of live television, earning acclaim in dramatic anthologies such as Studio One, Kraft Television Theatre, and Philco Television Playhouse. Her powerful performances led one critic to call her the Helen Hayes of television. In 1953, she starred in the live television production of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful, a role she reprised on Broadway opposite Lillian Gish. That stage performance caught the attention of director Elia Kazan and producer Sam Spiegel, who were casting the gritty 1954 drama On the Waterfront.

Kazan had Saint read lines and improvise a scene with Marlon Brando, who was already cast as the embattled boxer Terry Malloy. Saint recalled an intense audition process where Brando put on a radio and danced, flipping her skirt and leaving her so embarrassed she cried slightly afterward. Yet the chemistry was immediate. Saint played Edie Doyle, the moral center and grieving sister of a murdered dockworker who draws Brando's flailing character toward redemption. She did not realize she had won the coveted part until an assistant director called to order costume fittings. For her feature film debut, Saint won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in March 1955. She was visibly pregnant when she accepted the trophy at the bicoastal ceremony in New York, excitedly telling the audience, I may have the baby right here! Two days later, she gave birth to her first child, Darrell.

Defying Hollywood Stereotypes in Hitchcock Classics

Following her meteoric film debut, Saint avoided being typecast as mere arm candy for male superstars. In 1957, she starred in A Hatful of Rain as the pregnant wife of a narcotics addict, and appeared in Raintree County alongside Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. Two years later, she delivered one of her most enduring performances in Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 spy thriller North by Northwest, starring opposite Cary Grant. Breaking with Hitchcock's tradition of casting vulnerable icy blondes, Saint portrayed Eve Kendall, a sophisticated double agent who could keep pace with Grant's character on the run from assassins.

Hitchcock took Saint shopping at Bergdorf Goodman to curate her exterior, focusing on her wardrobe, hair, and jewelry to establish the character. He didn't talk about acting. He worked with me from the outside in, Saint recalled in a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair. And just from creating that exterior for me, he gave me the sense of a spy lady. Her delivery of suggestive lines, including telling Grant It's going to be a long night, and I don't particularly like the book I've started, cemented her status as a cinematic icon.

That five-year streak of prestige cinema continued with Otto Preminger's historical epic Exodus in 1960, which reunited her with Paul Newman, and John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down in 1962 with Warren Beatty. Despite these plum roles, Saint made a conscious decision to prioritize her family after marrying director-producer Jeffrey Hayden in 1951. I had an agent once who wanted me to make many more movies, Saint told CBS Sunday Morning in 2014. I said, 'I can't. I can only do one a year, if that. I have children, young children.' And he said, 'Well, I guess you won't be a superstar.' And I said, 'Well, I guess not.' The couple remained married for 65 years until Hayden's death in December 2016.

Television Mastery and Later Screen Contributions

As major film roles slowed in the 1970s and 1980s, Saint maintained a prolific career in television, earning multiple Emmy nominations. Her television credits included How the West Was Won, the acclaimed 1978 two-hander telefilm Taxi!! with Martin Sheen, and playing Cybill Shepherd's mother on the hit 1980s ABC series Moonlighting. In 1990, she won a Primetime Emmy Award for her performance as a rich, narcissistic matriarch in the NBC miniseries People Like Us, based on a novel by Dominick Dunne. Her later television work spanned projects including the 1996 Titanic miniseries and voice acting in the animated series The Legend of Korra in 2012.

Saint returned to the big screen periodically in later decades, playing Tom Hanks' mother in Garry Marshall's Nothing in Common (1986), Martha Kent in Superman Returns (2006), and appearing in Winter's Tale (2014). Alongside her husband, she also produced PBS documentaries, including Children in America's Schools with Bill Moyers, which won an Emmy in 1996. Dedicated to civic causes, she campaigned for cell-phone-free driving with her own bumper sticker slogan, Get Off The Phone Or Get Off The Road, and supported the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

Saint is survived by her two children, Darrell and Laurette; four grandchildren, Eli, Tyler, Molly, and Stella; and two great-grandchildren, Arlo and Finley.