Eva Marie Saint has died at age 102, a family spokesperson confirmed.
The Oscar-winning actress passed away Tuesday of natural causes at her Los Angeles home, the spokesperson announced. Saint, 102, was among the final surviving stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, her career stretching across more than seven decades of film, television and theater.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Saint broke into show business through live television in New York. She first appeared on the NBC-TV program “Campus Hoopla” in 1946, three years before a Life magazine feature chronicled her life as a struggling actor scraping by in the city. Theater credits followed as she built her resume on the East Coast.
Her transition to film brought immediate immortality. Saint made her feature debut in Elia Kazan’s 1954 “On the Waterfront” opposite Marlon Brando and Karl Malden, a performance that won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She accepted the Oscar while heavily pregnant with her son, Darrell.
“If you ever see footage of me — when they announce my name — you can see me pause and wait a moment,” she recalled in a 2010 interview. “Jeff had his thumb on my thigh; I couldn’t get up. So I slowly walked up and said something like, ‘I’m so excited I might have the baby right here.'”
She delivered Darrell two days after the ceremony. Saint shared both children with her husband, director Jeffrey Hayden; their marriage lasted 65 years until his death in 2016.
The actress later described the degrading audition process Kazan put her through for the waterfront role. During the same 2010 interview, she remembered them asking how much she “weighed, [her] height and [her] bust size.”
“And I thought, ‘This is silly. This is not for me. I want to stay in the theater. Which I think I certainly would have had we stayed in New York,'” she explained.
Whatever her doubts, the chemistry with Brando proved undeniable. She described their first meeting in a room where music suddenly filled the space.
“He put the radio on, and we started dancing,” she said. “He did something to flip my skirt, and I was so embarrassed I cried a little bit afterward. It was too much; it was all too much. But Kazan saw the chemistry, and he could see that it could work for the movie.”
She never stopped praising her co-star. Saint called Brando “wonderful” and “probably the finest actor I’ve ever worked with.”
Alfred Hitchcock selected Saint from a field of blonde actresses for 1959’s “North by Northwest,” the thriller now ranked No. 40 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Movies. The director, notorious for his obsessive control over female stars, personally picked her wardrobe during a shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan.
Her filmography expanded to include “Exodus,” “A Hatful of Rain,” and “The Sandpiper” alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Decades later, she found new generations of viewers through the 2005 children’s film “Because of Winn-Dixie” and 2006’s “Superman Returns.”
Saint maintained a television presence throughout the 1970s and 1980s, reuniting with Malden in the telefilm “Fatal Vision” and taking a recurring role as Cybill Shepherd’s mother on “Moonlighting.” She returned to the Oscar stage in 2018 to present the Best Costume Design award at the 90th Academy Awards.
Even at the century mark, she defied expectations. Ahead of her 100th birthday in 2024, Saint said she would celebrate with four generations of family.
“I certainly don’t feel 100 years old,” she shared. “I continue to take walks out in the fresh air, like watching baseball — especially the Los Angeles Dodgers- and enjoy time with my family and friends. A good life.”
She is survived by her two children and four grandchildren.
The 1950s Emmy nominations that preceded her film stardom came for Paddy Chayefsky’s “Middle of the Night” and a television musical adaptation of “Our Town” that also featured Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman.