Eva Marie Saint, Oscar Winner for On the Waterfront, Dies at 102

Eva Marie Saint, the actor who won an Academy Award for her film debut in On the Waterfront and later traded sly banter with Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, has died at 102. Her publicist, Jeff Sanderson, said she died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles with family around her.

Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in upstate New York. She planned to become a teacher but took up acting at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, then moved to New York City, where, according to CBS News, she studied at the Actors Studio, and found steady work in radio and in the live television dramas of the early 1950s. Her role in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful on television carried over to Broadway, where Elia Kazan saw her.

Kazan cast her opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront in 1954. As Edie Doyle, a young woman drawn to the dockworker Terry Malloy even as she suspects his role in her brother’s death, she brought a quiet steadiness to a film full of bruising performances. It won eight Oscars, one of them hers for best supporting actress, though she was effectively the female lead. She accepted the award while visibly pregnant; her son was born two days later.

Five years later Hitchcock gave her a very different part. In North by Northwest she played Eve Kendall, a cool and mysterious stranger who meets Grant’s hunted advertising man on a train and turns out to be a secret agent. CBS News reported that Saint recalled Hitchcock’s direction as amounting to three instructions: lower her voice, keep her hands still and look Grant in the eye. Unlike some actresses who described him as harsh, she remembered him as courteous and funny.

Her other films included Raintree County, A Hatful of Rain, Exodus with Paul Newman, All Fall Down, The Sandpiper, Grand Prix and, much later, Nothing in Common with Tom Hanks and Superman Returns, in which she played Martha Kent. She worked extensively on stage and in television, earning five Emmy nominations and winning for the 1990 television film People Like Us.

Saint married the director Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, and they stayed together until his death in 2016. She made no secret that she limited herself to about one film a year while her children were young. CBS News reported that she told its Sunday Morning program in 2014 that an agent once warned her she would never be a superstar that way, and that she answered that she supposed not.

The Guardian’s obituary argued that Hollywood seldom gave her parts as rich as those two signature roles afterward, even as she kept working into her late 90s, including in a podcast play. Saint is survived by her son, Darrell, her daughter, Laurette, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, CBS News reported.