Hollywood has lost one of the defining actresses of its golden era, with Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint dying at the age of 102.
Saint, whose performances in On the Waterfront and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest established her as one of the most respected stars of the 1950s and 1960s, died on Tuesday, October 6, at her home in Los Angeles, People.com reported.
According to a press release, she died of natural causes and was “surrounded by family and loved ones” at the time.
She is survived by her two children, Darrell and Laurette, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey. She studied at Bowling Green State University in Ohio before beginning her entertainment career in television. Her first credited role came in 1946 when she appeared as a spokeswoman on the game show Campus Hoopla.
Television and radio occupied much of her early career, with Saint steadily building her profile before making her Broadway debut in The Trip to Bountiful in 1953.
It was cinema, however, that transformed her career.
Saint made an immediate impression with her film debut as Edie Doyle in Elia Kazan’s 1954 classic On the Waterfront. Her performance earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and instantly placed her among Hollywood’s brightest new talents.
Saint was heavily pregnant at the time of the ceremony, just two days away from giving birth to her first child. As she accepted the Oscar, she joked, “I may have the baby right here!”
Her Oscar-winning performance was followed by a string of prominent roles, including That Certain Feeling (1956), A Hatful of Rain (1957), Raintree County (1957), Exodus (1960), All Fall Down (1962), 36 Hours (1965), Grand Prix (1966), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), The Stalking Moon (1968) and Cancel My Reservation (1972).
Yet her role as Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest remains one of the performances most closely associated with her name.
The 1959 thriller turned Saint into a major international star, and she later recalled how Hitchcock shaped her performance without focusing on conventional acting techniques.
“He didn’t talk about acting. He worked with me from the outside in,” Saint explained in a 2014 Vanity Fair interview. “My hair, my makeup, my shoes, my jewelry, my purse, my gloves, everything. And just from creating that exterior for me, he gave me the sense of a spy lady. But we never talked about emotion. He told me not to use my hands — I have a habit of doing that — and to lower my voice. And always, in my scenes with Cary Grant, look directly into his eyes, which was not difficult.”
Saint also remembered the memorable kissing scene she shared with Grant aboard the train.
“I was hoping I wouldn’t step on his feet,” she said. “That was the scene on the train, and we had to move like the train was moving, and there was a still man taking photos while we were doing the scene. He was up about 12 or 15 steps. He got so involved in the kissing scene he fell off the ladder. He didn’t hurt himself so we can laugh about it. So then we had to do it again, which wasn’t bad.”
Grant was not the only celebrated leading man with whom Saint shared the screen. Her career also included performances alongside Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty and James Garner.
Her experience with Newman produced another memorable story. During the making of Exodus, director Otto Preminger reportedly demonstrated how he wanted Newman to kiss Saint by kissing the actress himself.
“Can you believe that? It’s true!” Saint told CBS. “It was on the hillside. And there’s Mr. Blue Eyes, right? Paul Newman. We know what to do, right? Preminger said, ‘Let me show you.’ It was very funny.”
Although Saint remained a sought-after actress, she deliberately kept her film appearances selective. Family played a major role in that decision, particularly while her children were young.
“I had an agent once who wanted me to make many more movies. I said, ‘I can’t. I can only do one a year, if that. I have children, young children,’ ” Saint recalled in 2014. “And he said, ‘Well, I guess you won’t be a superstar.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess not.’ ”
Instead, she built a substantial television career, appearing in made-for-TV movies and guest roles across numerous series. Her work earned her one Emmy Award and four additional Emmy nominations.
She continued acting for decades, taking on roles well into the 21st century. Her final screen work came in 2014, when she completed her voice role as Katara in The Legend of Korra and appeared as Adult Willa Penn in Winter’s Tale.
Away from the screen, Saint enjoyed a marriage that lasted more than six decades with television director Jeffrey Hayden. The couple met on a subway and married in 1951. Hayden’s directing credits included Leave It to Beaver and The Incredible Hulk.
They also shared the stage in a 2011 San Francisco production of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters.
The couple had their own playful theories about why their marriage endured for so long. Saint once recalled an interview in which she was asked about the secret to staying married.
“Jeff and I did an interview, and this very prim and proper lady said, ‘Miss Saint, how do you stay married?’ ” Saint told NPR in 2014. “So I become serious and I say, ‘Well, I think you have interests in things that you do together. You certainly have to decide whether you’re going to have family or not.’ So I go on and on. She turns to Jeff. She said, ‘Well, Mr. Hayden, what do you think the secret is?’ And he said, ‘Sex.’ ”
Their family life remained important to Saint throughout her career. Her son Darrell recalled how she tried to arrange her filming commitments around her children.
“She always tried to schedule her location work during the summer so my sister and I could join her,” son Darrell told PEOPLE in 2000. “Israel was a long flight from Los Angeles. It seemed like days.”
Looking back on a career that stretched across film, television and theatre, Saint attributed much of what she achieved to an understated quality.
“I am very patient,” she said during a Los Angeles Magazine interview in 2014. “I take pride in being patient with my husband, my children, my grandchildren. I was patient about my career. I really did feel that if I worked hard, if I were out there every day making the rounds, something good would happen.”
