Eva Marie Saint, Oscar winner for On the Waterfront, dies at 102, family says

Eva Marie Saint, one of the last stars of Hollywood’s 1950s golden age, died on Tuesday, October 6, at her home in Los Angeles. She reached 102. Her publicist, Jeff Sanderson, said she died of natural causes, surrounded by family and loved ones, CBS News reports; the Guardian and The Hollywood Reporter attribute the news to a family spokesman. Variety, which broke its obituary at 1:59 PM PT, describes her as the oldest living Oscar winner until Tuesday. She won that Oscar for her very first film role, and she kept working in some form for more than seven decades, from early radio and live television to a streamed podcast play in her late 90s.

Saint came into the world on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, according to CBS News, Variety, the Los Angeles Times, and The Hollywood Reporter, and grew up near Albany, New York. (TheWrap says she grew up in Albany and Delmar and does not mention Newark.) She planned to teach school and studied education at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where, on a dare, she tried out for a college play, won the lead, and switched her major to drama, The Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times report. Bowling Green later named a campus theater after her. In New York she earned her first paycheck, $10, as an off-camera applauder on a variety program called The Borden Show, Variety and THR report, then took modeling jobs, a Keds sneakers commercial, and small radio soap parts while she studied at the Actors Studio.

Early setbacks shaped her. Director Joshua Logan dropped her from the 1948 stage production of Mister Roberts with Henry Fonda because the producers thought she “looked too innocent,” The Hollywood Reporter says; Jocelyn Brando, Marlon Brando’s sister, took the part. Live television gave her a footing instead. She worked on anthology series such as Studio One, Kraft Television Theatre, and the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, and in 1953 she played opposite Lillian Gish in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful on television and then on Broadway. Variety calls it the first TV drama to move to Broadway.

That Broadway run led to On the Waterfront. Elia Kazan saw her onstage and asked her to improvise a scene with Brando. Brando turned on a radio and the two started dancing, Saint told the Santa Barbara Independent in 2010, according to CBS News. “But Kazan saw the chemistry, and he could see that it could work for the movie,” she said. She played Edie Doyle, the sister of a murdered dockworker who falls for Brando’s Terry Malloy. The New York Times review at the time, quoted by Variety, said: “Amid scenes of carnage, she gives tenderness and sensitivity to genuine romance.” The film won eight Oscars, including best picture, and Saint took best supporting actress. She accepted the statuette nine months pregnant and joked, “I may have the baby right here!” according to CBS News. Her son, Darrell, arrived two days later. THR says she celebrated with “a Chinese dinner and a few beers.” Later she called Brando “just a genius” and a “prince,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

Five years later came the role many viewers remember first. In North by Northwest she played Eve Kendall, the double agent who meets Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill on a train and ends up hanging from Mount Rushmore. The Guardian quotes the film’s description of her as “a blond who has all the answers.” Hitchcock, the Los Angeles Times reports, called her “sexy, dangerous, mysterious and alluring.” She remembered his acting notes as short. “Three things: Lower your voice. Don’t use your hands. And look directly into Cary Grant’s eyes at all times,” she recalled, as quoted by CBS News; the Los Angeles Times cites a slightly different wording from a 2000 NPR interview. To Vanity Fair in 2014, according to THR, she described a director focused on costume rather than motive: “He didn’t talk about acting. He worked with me from the outside in. My hair, my makeup, my shoes, my jewelry, my purse, my gloves, everything.”

She then chose family over stardom, and she said so plainly. She told CBS Sunday Morning in 2014 about an agent who wanted many more movies from her. “I can’t. I can only do one a year, if that. I have children, young children,” she said she told him. Asked what became of the agent, she answered: “Fired him.” She made about 20 films in more than 50 years, the Los Angeles Times reports. “Family always came first,” she told Moving Pictures Magazine in 2006. She brought her family along on location for Exodus in Cyprus and Israel and for Grand Prix in Europe, CBS News and THR report. Her films after Waterfront include A Hatful of Rain and Raintree County (both 1957), Exodus (1960), All Fall Down (1962), 36 Hours (1964), The Sandpiper (1965), Norman Jewison’s 1966 Cold War comedy with Carl Reiner, Grand Prix (1966), The Stalking Moon, and Loving (1970).

Television carried the second half of her career. She earned Emmy nominations for a 1977 western miniseries and for the two-hander Taxi!! opposite Martin Sheen, among others, and finally won a supporting actress Emmy in 1990 for People Like Us, adapted from Dominick Dunne’s novel. She played Cybill Shepherd’s mother on Moonlighting and Roz’s mother on Frasier, and voiced a role on Nickelodeon’s The Legend of Korra, THR reports. She returned to film as Tom Hanks’s mother in Nothing in Common (1986), then appeared in Because of Winn-Dixie and Don’t Come Knocking (both 2005), Superman Returns (2006), and Winter’s Tale (2014). At 97 she played Marisa Tomei’s aunt in The Bus Ride, a short play streamed on The Pack Podcast, CBS News reports. She holds two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for film and one for television, Variety notes.

Off screen, she and Hayden produced PBS documentaries, including Children in America’s Schools with Bill Moyers, which won an Emmy, TheWrap reports. She supported the Motion Picture and Television Fund and the Epilepsy Foundation of Los Angeles, served on the Academy’s Nicholl screenwriting fellowship committee, and campaigned early against phones behind the wheel with her own bumper sticker, “Get Off The Phone Or Get Off The Road,” Variety reports. She donated much of her memorabilia to the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, THR says. Saint and Hayden stayed married 65 years until his death in December 2016. As of Tuesday afternoon PT, the reports this desk read carried no public tributes from co-stars or studios and no word on memorial plans.