Eva Marie Saint, the poised screen star whose performances helped define Hollywood’s golden era in films such as On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, has died at the age of 102, her publicist said Tuesday.
Across a career that stretched more than 70 years, Saint became known for her understated intensity and unmistakable grace, working with towering directors including Alfred Hitchcock and Elia Kazan. Her legacy spans film and television, where she also earned an Emmy.
Her representative, Jeff Sanderson, said Saint died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and loved ones.
Saint entered cinema in spectacular fashion. Her first film role — in On the Waterfront — brought her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Kazan’s searing crime drama, scored by Leonard Bernstein, is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.
The movie also boasts a celebrated ensemble, led by Marlon Brando, who won an Oscar for his performance.
Released in 1954, the film propelled Saint to stardom as the luminous counterpoint to Brando’s brooding, muscular boxer.
Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando during the filming of On the Waterfront
She later shared the screen with Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s landmark thriller North by Northwest.
At the time, Saint was viewed as an unexpected pick for a classic “Hitchcock blonde” — a double-agent femme fatale who captivates Grant’s character.
Yet she made the part her own, even as she never collaborated again with Hitchcock, the English director notorious for pushing his leading women and for micromanaging performances down to the smallest detail.
“He worked with me from the outside in,” she later said.
“My hair, my makeup, my shoes, my jewellery, my purse, my gloves, everything. And just from creating that exterior for me, he gave me the sense of a spy lady.”
Timeless performance
Saint’s filmography also included major work with Otto Preminger, starring opposite Paul Newman in Exodus in 1960.
Two years after that, she played Warren Beatty’s love interest in John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down.
With Hollywood opening wide before her, Saint “could have been a contender” for full-blown superstardom — borrowing the immortal line from On the Waterfront — but she chose instead to step back and focus on raising a family with director Jeffrey Hayden.
Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant in North by Northwest
Her family life began almost in tandem with her biggest professional triumph: her eldest son, Darrell, was born just two days after she won her Oscar.
In the years since, critics have increasingly singled out Saint’s portrayal of Edie in On the Waterfront as the film’s defining performance, in a picture long celebrated for its male roles.
Her quiet, controlled style stood in sharp contrast to Brando’s famously charged method acting.
“He was adorable – really adorable, but a little frightening,” she later said of her enigmatic co-star.
“I felt that he could see right through me,” she told Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in 2013.
More than 50 years later, Saint returned to the big screen as Superman’s adoptive mother in the 2006 blockbuster Superman Returns, a role she took on in her early 80s.
She continued working well into her mid-90s, appearing in the supernatural fantasy Winter’s Tale alongside Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe, and portraying a mother superior in the nun drama Mariette in Ecstasy, released in 2019.
Still, television — where she first honed her craft in live dramas — remained the medium she favored most.
In 1990, she won an Emmy for playing a wealthy widow in the acclaimed miniseries People Like Us.
65-year marriage
Saint was born on 4 July, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, to Quaker parents, whom she said instilled in her a strong sense of discipline.
She enrolled at Bowling Green State University intending to become a teacher, but after discovering a love for theatre, she graduated with a degree in dramatic arts.
Saint later trained in New York at the Herbert Berghof Studio and then at the Actors Studio, the famed home of method acting co-founded by Kazan.
Eva Marie Saint at the Art Directors Guild 20th Annual Excellence in Production Awards in Beverly Hills in January 2016
In an industry where long marriages are rare, Saint and Hayden remained together for 65 years, until his death in 2016.
Honored with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Saint once suggested that time itself enriched her artistry.
“The longer you live, the smarter you get, because you’ve been around, you’ve seen things,” she told TCM.
“You’ve gone through different emotional experiences in your own life, and hopefully, you understand things better.
“And that makes you a better actress.”
Source: AFP
