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Academy Award-winning actress Eva Marie Saint, who starred in such classics as “On the Waterfront” and “North by Northwest,” but defied Hollywood norms throughout her long 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 made the transition from playing sultry spies to Southern belles and Superman’s stepmother, Saint made her motion picture debut opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazanand “On the Shore” (1954). Saint played Edie Doyle, whose brother was murdered by guys who worked for a mob boss who ran a longshoremen’s union; her character becomes involved with Brando’s dock worker, Terry Malloy.
Her performance as Saint won one of the film’s eight Academy Awards. (She was only the fourth person to win an Oscar for best supporting actress for their first film.) On the night she received her award, she was visibly pregnant. “My baby might be here!” she said. (Her son, Darrell, was born two days later.)
Saint married director-producer Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, and the couple remained together for 65 years until his death in 2016. They had two children. Naomh had made it clear that family was more important to her than her career.
“I once had an agent who wanted me to do a lot more movies,” she told CBS’ “Sunday Morning” in 2014. “I said, ‘I can’t. I can only do one year, if that. I have children, young children.’ And he said, “Well, I guess you’re not going to be a superstar.” And I said, “Well, I don’t think so.”
And what happened to that agent? “He burned,” she said.
She maintained her self-imposed limitations on films; she also brought her extended family to the set of Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” while filming in Cyprus and Israel. Despite not cracking movies, Saint followed up her Oscar win by appearing in many acclaimed 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, winning for the 1990 TV movie “People Like Us.” At the age of 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 Grantand Roger Thornhill on the run from murderous spies in 1959 Alfred Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest.” Little does Thornhill realize that Kendall himself is a secret agent.
Saint said Hitchcock’s instructions to her to play a sex spy were simple: “Three things: Lower your voice. Don’t use your hands. And always look straight into Cary Grant’s eyes,” she recalled.
Hitchcock had a reputation for being hard on young female actors, but not Saint. “I found him to be an amazing director, a gentleman, funny, polite, but there are other actresses who don’t feel the same way. I don’t even want to hear stories about him,” she said.
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Although playing a femme fatale was new to her, Saint said she was not surprised to watch 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 New York, and attended Bowling Green State University in Ohio (where she was the “Sweater Queen”). Originally intending to become a teacher, Saint began acting in student productions, and changed the focus of her career.
Moving to New York City, she trained at the Actors Studio by the famous acting coach Lee Strasberg, and was hired for a production of “Mister Roberts” with Henry Fonda. But he was let go by director Joshua Logan; she found out it was because she was considered “too innocent” looking. The actor who took her place was Jocelyn Brando (Marlon’s sister).
Crushed, she was nevertheless determined not to let him persuade her to pursue an acting career.
When she started, she told Variety in 2021, Saint and a female co-star would speak in a made-up language while riding the subway. “We were so sorry that we didn’t get jobs, so I suggested that we do something so that people would pay attention to us,” she said. “When we started gabbing, we would get a few listeners. People would put down their papers and ask, what language is that?”
Saint established herself in the early days of live television as a dramatic actress 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 seen by Kazan, director of “Waterfront”.
He asked Saint to audition opposite Brando in an impromptu scene. When he entered the room, Brando turned on the radio, and the two began to dance. “He did something to turn up my skirt, and I was so embarrassed that I cried a little bit afterwards,” 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 great to work with.
“What was a bit scary about him, which worked for me in the film, was his attitude towards people who were so loving,” she said. “He could look at someone or talk to them and tell what that person was about. And he would mention it about the people around us. So sometimes I would sit there and think, ‘If he knows 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 film. He had been out in the world and I was at home protected, so I used that.”
After “Waterfont,” Saint appeared on TV in a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatraand also appeared in several theater productions.
But Hollywood called, and the Oscar winner appeared opposite actors such 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 (“There is nothing common”).
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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 television she appeared in “The 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 television series “Titanic,” and “Frasier.”
And in recent years, Saint did a podcast. She played Marisa Tomei’s aunt in “The Bus Ride,” a short drama streamed on “The Pack Podcast.” She said the wild character, written by Eugene Pack, was strong, saying his work was “so honest.”
“I’ve lived long enough to know what’s honest and what’s not, and Eugene plays,” she said. “They’re attractive, they’re positive, but they’re not saccharine.”
She has two children, Darrell and Laurette, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, Sanderson said in a statement.
