Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress celebrated for classic films such as On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, has died at the age of 102.
A spokesperson for Saint said she died Tuesday from natural causes, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Saint won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her feature-film debut in 1954’s On the Waterfront, opposite screen legend Marlon Brando.
Over her long career, Saint also received a Primetime Emmy Award and earned nominations for a Golden Globe and two BAFTA Awards.
Beyond Brando and Cary Grant, her co-star in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller North by Northwest, Saint shared the screen with a remarkable roster of leading men, including Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, James Garner and Bob Hope.
Though Saint continued acting into the 2010s, she remains best known for her landmark work during the 1950s—particularly her performance in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront and her collaboration with Hitchcock on North by Northwest.
Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress known for classic films including North by Northwest and On the Waterfront, has died at 102. Her spokesperson said she died Tuesday from natural causes, according to The Hollywood Reporter; above, Saint in 2019
One of Eva Marie Saint’s most celebrated films was Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (above), in which she played a double agent who helps an innocent man caught in a deadly story of murder and espionage, opposite Cary Grant
Saint made her feature-film debut in On the Waterfront, starring Brando as Terry Malloy, a former boxer who becomes a longshoreman after a local mob boss pressures him to lose a match.
After Terry witnesses the mobster’s men murder a dock worker to stop him from testifying in a corruption inquiry, he struggles to decide whether to tell the truth or remain silent so he can keep working.
Saint played Edie, the murdered dock worker’s sister, who urges Terry to testify before the commission.
For her first film performance, Saint won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and received a nomination for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for Most Promising Newcomer.
Her immediate success in Hollywood brought a string of leading roles—and salaries far exceeding the $7,500 she earned for On the Waterfront.
Saint also demonstrated a gift for comedy when she followed On the Waterfront with That Certain Feeling in 1956, co-starring with comedian Bob Hope.
The following year, she took another dramatic departure in the Civil War film Raintree County, which also featured her lifelong friends Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
Saint further tested the boundaries of Hollywood’s Production Code with the 1957 addiction drama A Hatful of Rain. The performance earned her another BAFTA nomination, this time for Best Foreign Actress.
Saint’s first masterpiece was On the Waterfront (1954; above), with Marlon Brando (left) as a prizefighter-turned-longshoreman torn between testifying in a corruption inquiry and staying silent to preserve his job at a mob-controlled dock
Saint, who was paid only $7,500 for On the Waterfront (pictured), made her feature-film debut in the Elia Kazan-directed drama
Saint won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her first film role and was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for Most Promising Newcomer; above, in 1955
Saint’s other defining film arrived at the close of the 1950s, when Alfred Hitchcock cast her as his latest glamorous blonde opposite Cary Grant in the comic spy thriller North by Northwest.
The film, a more ambitious return to Hitchcock’s early-career thrillers about a ‘wrong man’ who is swept up into espionage against his will, starred Grant as an ad executive who is mistaken for a spy by a dangerous group of international criminals.
Saint played a nuanced role as the apparent femme fatale and arm candy of the villain (played by James Mason), but she’s later revealed to be a double agent working behind the scenes for a US intelligence agency.
The breezy film was a hit with critics and audiences alike, becoming one of the best-regarded movies Saint, Grant and Hitchcock ever made.
Saint had married director Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, and as the ’60s rolled around she began to limit her film work in order to reserve time for him and their two children.
At the end of the ’50s, Saint scored another hit with critics and audiences alike in North by Northwest (above)
