Eva Marie Saint, star of “On the Waterfront” and “North by Northwest,” dies at age 102

Academy Award-winning actor Eva Marie Saint, who starred in such classics as “On the Waterfront” and “North by Northwest,” but also bucked Hollywood conventions throughout her lengthy career, has died. She was 102.

Her publicist, Jeff Sanderson, said she died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and loved ones.

A regal-looking blonde who ricocheted from playing sultry spies to Southern belles and Superman’s stepmother, Saint made her motion picture debut opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan‘s “On the Waterfront” (1954). Saint played Edie Doyle, whose brother was murdered by thugs working for a mob boss running a longshoremen’s union; her character becomes involved with Brando’s pugilistic dockworker Terry Malloy. 

Her performance earned Saint one of the film’s eight Academy Awards. (She was only the fourth person to win a best supporting actress Oscar for their film debut.) On the night she received her award, she was visibly pregnant. “I may have the baby right here!” she said. (Her son, Darrell, was born two days later.)

Saint married director-producer Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, and the couple stayed together for 65 years until his death in 2016. They had two children. Saint had made it clear that family was more important to her than her career. 

“I had an agent once who wanted me to make many more movies,” she 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.'”

And what happened to that agent? “Fired him,” she said. 

She kept up her self-imposed limit on films; she also brought her extended family to the set of Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” while filming in Cyprus and Israel. Despite not cranking out movies, Saint followed her Oscar win by appearing in many prestige projects, including “A Hatful of Rain,” “Raintree County,” “All Fall Down,” “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” “Grand Prix,” and the eponymous TV miniseries based on “How the West Was Won.” She also received five Emmy nominations, and won for the 1990 TV movie “People Like Us.” At age 97, she appeared on a podcast series.

But perhaps her most memorable performance was as Eve Kendall, a mysterious blonde who crosses paths with Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornhill as he runs from murderous spies in the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest.” Little does Thornhill realize that Kendall herself is a secret agent.

Saint said Hitchcock’s direction to her playing a sexy spy was simple: “Three things: Lower your voice. Don’t use your hands. And look directly into Cary Grant’s eyes at all times,” she recalled. 

Hitchcock had a reputation for being tough on young female actors, but not Saint. “I found that he was such a wonderful director, gentleman, funny, courteous, but there are other actresses who don’t feel the same way. I don’t even want to hear stories about him,” she said.

Though playing a femme fatale was new to her, Saint said she wasn’t surprised upon watching her performance. “No. I don’t think actors are surprised,” she said. “I mean, that’s what we do.”

“Too innocent” looking

Born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, Saint grew up in upstate New York, and attended Bowling Green State University in Ohio (where she was “Sweater Queen”). Originally planning to become a teacher, Saint began acting in student productions, and changed her career focus. 

Moving to New York City, she trained at the Actors Studio with famed acting coach Lee Strasberg, and was hired for a production of “Mister Roberts” alongside Henry Fonda. But she was let go by director Joshua Logan; she found out it was because she was deemed “too innocent” looking. The actor who took her place was Jocelyn Brando (Marlon’s sister). 

Crushed, she was nonetheless determined not to let it dissuade her from pursuing an acting career. 

When she was starting out, she told Variety in 2021, Saint and a fellow female actor would talk in a made-up language while riding the subway. “We were so frustrated about not getting jobs, so I suggested that we do something so people would notice us,” she said. “When we’d start gabbing, we’d get a little audience. People would put down their papers and wonder, what language is that?”

Saint established herself in the early days of live television as a dramatic actor in plays on “Studio One,” “Goodyear Television Playhouse,” “GE True Theater” and “Philco Television Playhouse.” She starred in the first TV production of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” and repeated her role on Broadway, where she was spotted by Kazan, the “Waterfront” director. 

He asked Saint to audition opposite Brando in an improvised scene. Upon entering the room, Brando put on a radio, and the two started dancing. “He did something to flip my skirt, and I was so embarrassed I cried a little bit afterward,” Saint told the Santa Barbara Independent in 2010. “But Kazan saw the chemistry, and he could see that it could work for the movie.”

She said Brando was wonderful to work with.

“What was a little scary about him, which worked for me in the movie, was his perception of people that was so keen,” she said. “He could look at somebody or talk with them and hone into what that person was all about. And he would mention it about people around us. So sometimes I would sit there and think, ‘If he knows that about that person, he must know more about me than I know about myself.’ It made me a little self-conscious, but I used that in the movie. He’d been out in the world and I had been at home protected, so I used that.”

Following “Waterfont,” Saint appeared on TV in a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra, and also appeared onstage numerous theater productions.

But Hollywood beckoned, and the Oscar winner starred opposite such actors as Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (“Raintree County”), Paul Newman (“Exodus”), Warren Beatty (“All Fall Down”), James Garner (“36 Hours”), Richard Burton and Taylor (“The Sandpiper”), Yves Montand (“Grand Prix”), Gregory Peck (“The Stalking Moon”), Bob Hope (“That Certain Feeling,” “Cancel My Reservation”), and Tom Hanks (“Nothing in Common”). 

Other film credits included “Because of Winn-Dixie,” “Don’t Come Knocking” (with Sam Shepard), “Superman Returns” (as Martha Kent), and “Winter’s Tale.” 

On TV she appeared in “The Best Little Girl in the World,” “Moonlighting,” the two-hander “Taxi!!” (opposite Martin Sheen), “The Last Days of Patton” (with George C. Scott), “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” “My Antonia,” the 1996 TV miniseries “Titanic,” and “Frasier.” 

And in recent years, Saint podcasted. She played Marisa Tomei’s aunt in “The Bus Ride,” a short play streamed on “The Pack Podcast.” She said the feisty character, written by Eugene Pack, was compelling, calling his work “so honest.”

“I’ve lived long enough to know what’s honest and what isn’t, and Eugene’s plays are,” she said. “They’re charming, they’re positive, but they’re not saccharine.”

Saint is survived by her two children, Darrell and Laurette, four grandchildren and two great grandchildren, Sanderson’s statement said.