Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint dies aged 102
She starred opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, then alongside Cary Grant in Hitchcock's North by Northwest.
Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint dies aged 102
Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress known for Hollywood classics including On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, has died at the age of 102.
Saint received the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her film debut in director Elia Kazan's 1954 crime drama On the Waterfront, where she played Edie Doyle, the love interest of Marlon Brando's conflicted boxer-turned-docker.
Five years later, she appeared as femme fatale Eve Kendall, dangerously seducing Cary Grant's entangled advertising executive in Alfred Hitchcock's spy thriller North by Northwest.
Family representative Jeff Sanderson confirmed that she died on Tuesday of natural causes, surrounded by family and loved ones at her home in Los Angeles.
Until her death, Saint was the oldest surviving Oscar winner and one of the last remaining stars from Hollywood's golden age.
She also won an Emmy in 1990 for playing a rich widow in the acclaimed TV miniseries People Like Us.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1924, Saint had first planned to become a teacher before discovering a passion for theatre.
She trained in New York at the Herbert Berghof Studio and then the Actors Studio, the home of method acting, which was co-founded by Kazan.
Saint made a striking entrance into Hollywood with her performance in Kazan's classic On the Waterfront.
Brando was known as an intense method actor, and Saint said she found him "adorable" but "a little frightening".
"I felt that he could see right through me," she told Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in a 2013 interview.
Still, she was seen as an unexpected choice to play one of "Hitchcock's blondes", as they were known at the time, in his masterpiece North by Northwest.
Her co-star Grant was known for being highly demanding of his leading ladies.
"He worked with me from the outside in," said Saint.
"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."
Saint also appeared opposite Paul Newman in Otto Preminger's Exodus in 1960, and she was Warren Beatty's love interest in John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down.
She later stepped away from the spotlight to raise a family with director Jeffrey Hayden.
Half a century later, Saint, then in her early 80s, returned to the big screen as Superman's adoptive mother in the 2006 blockbuster Superman Returns.
She later appeared in the supernatural fantasy Winter's Tale, alongside Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe, and in the 2019 nun drama Mariette in Ecstasy.
Saint, who has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, said her long career in acting had given her work greater depth.
"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."
Saint's marriage to Hayden lasted 65 years, until his death in 2016, and she is survived by their two children.