Eva Marie Saint, the legendary actress who earned an Academy Award for her role in Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, died at 102 on Tuesday in her Los Angeles home, her family representative Jeff Sanderson confirmed. She passed away of natural causes, surrounded by loved ones.
Born in New Jersey in 1924 into a Quaker family, Saint began her career in radio and television before moving to the stage. A 1949 Life magazine feature chronicled her early struggles to break into the entertainment industry.
She gained wider recognition in the early 1950s, appearing in the original television production and Broadway premiere of Horton Foote’s play The Trip to Bountiful in 1953. A year later she made her film debut in On the Waterfront, where her portrayal of Edie Doyle earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and cemented her status as a leading Hollywood performer.
Saint’s career spanned decades and included roles in That Certain Feeling, Fred Zinnemann’s A Hatful of Rain, and the period western Raintree County with Elizabeth Taylor. In 1959 she starred opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, playing Eve Kendall, a mysterious woman caught up in an espionage plot.
She continued to work in film and television, winning an Emmy in 1990 for her performance as a wealthy widow in the miniseries People Like Us. In 2006 she introduced herself to a younger generation as Martha Kent, Superman’s adoptive mother, in Superman Returns.
Saint, who had two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, once reflected on how her long life deepened her acting: “The longer you live, the smarter you get, because you’ve been around, you’ve seen things,” she told Turner Classic Movies. “You’ve gone through different emotional experiences in your own life, and hopefully, you understand things better.”
She was married to actor Jeffrey Hayden for 65 years until his death in 2016. She is survived by their two children.
