10/08/2026
Eva Marie Saint Dies: Oscar-Winning Star Of Hollywood Classics ‘On The Waterfront’ And ‘North By Northwest’ Was 102
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Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning actor who graced some of the most beloved and revered Hollywood films of the mid-20th century with an incisive Actors Studio-honed talent for character and a stunning beauty, has died. She was 102.
Her rep said she died Tuesday of natural causes at her Los Angeles home, surrounded by family and loved ones.
Whether serving as the loyal, grief-toughened girlfriend of Marlon Brando’s embattled boxer Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan’s classic On the Waterfront or subverting everything Hitchock expected from his “icy blonde” femme fatales by layering her government-agent character in North by Northwest (with Cary Grant) with subtle moments of intelligence and rebellion, Saint was never mere arm candy for the male superstars with whom she shared a screen. Was she too smart to fade into a scene? Too captivating? It was all that and more.
Born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, and growing up in Albany and Delmar, New York, Saint later studied acting at Bowling Green State University in Ohio (she received the Bowling Green State University Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018) and, after graduating in 1946, she was soon living in New York City, studying at The American Theatre Wing and with Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio and working as an NBC page.
By the late ’40s, she was appearing in the occasional TV fare, sometimes live, sometimes not, then common in New York City. By 1950 she had a recurring role as the brave (and smitten) Lt. Wilma Deering on the 1950 sci-fi kiddie series Buck Rogers, and three years later was on the Broadway stage in the Horton Foote play The Trip To Bountiful (costars were Lillian Gish and Jo Van Fleet). For her performance as Thelma, the kind young stranger who shares a bus trip with the elderly woman returning to her long-ago home in Bountiful, Saint won the 1954 Outer Critics Circle Special Award.
The following year brought two Emmy nominations, both for Best Actress in a Single Performance. The first was Saint’s performance in TV’s Middle of the Night by Paddy Chayefsky. In the play she portrayed the young mistress of a middle-aged man portrayed by E.G. Marshall. Her second Emmy-nominated performance that year was for the Producers Showcase presentation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. With a cast that included Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra, Saint played Emily, one of two teenagers who fall in love with one another and get married (Newman was the beau).
The same year she won the Outer Critics Cirlce Award for her Broadway performance, she appeared in what would be her early signature role: As On The Waterfront‘s Edie Doyle, Saint portrayed the dark tale’s moral center, the light that attracts Brando’s flailing has-been boxer in a dockside world of corruption and murder. Giving her character some heft beyond the saintly was a backstory in which Edie’s brother had recently met with a violent death on the very docks that Brando’s Terry Malloy is forever scrambling for advantage. The combination of Brando and Saint was among the most effective romantic pairings to hit the era’s big screens.
Both Brando and Saint won Academy Awards for the film, and until her death Saint was the oldest living Academy Award winner.
Saint, who had relocated to Los Angeles in 1956 and would live there until her death, followed up Waterfront with more TV performances and, in 1957, the film A Hatful of Rain. That picture ushered in a remarkable five-year, five-picture streak that would be anchored by the film many consider Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, and few would argue that it wasn’t at least in the master’s Top Three. 1959’s North By Northwest starred Saint and a never-better Cary Grant, both setting the standard for mid-century chic, she either in a dark pencil skirt suit or, for contrast, a full-skirted black dress patterned with deep red roses. As for Grant, few leading men ever looked so dashing in that ’50s ad man uniform of a gray flannel suit.
Breaking with Hitchcock’s tradition of casting “icy blondes” in victim roles, Saint’s Eve was no one’s fool, a government agent who could keep up move for move with Grant’s on the run “wrong man” mistaken for a spy. Not only does Saint have the privilege of taking part in one of Hitchcock’s greatest action-adventure set pieces – she and Grant climb Mount Rushmore to escape the bad guys – but she also has one of the best come-on lines the director would ever include in his films: Shortly after meeting Grant’s character on a train, Saint purrs, “It’s going to be a long night, and I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started.”
If the other films in that five-year stretch couldn’t quite match North By Northwest, they were solid entries nonetheless: 1957’s addiction drama A Hatful of Rain and Elizabeth Taylor-Montgomery Clift costume drama Raintree County; Otto Preminger’s big-budget prestige historical epic Exodus about the founding of Israel that reunited Saint with Newman; and, in 1962, John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down, a film adaptation by playwright William Inge of the James Leo Herlihy novel. With a cast that included Saint, Warren Beatty, Angela Lansbury, Brandon de Wilde and Karl Malden, All Fall Down was yet another big prestige entry but this time failing to win over audiences or critics (although the performances, especially that of Saint, drew plaudits).
After All Fall Down, Saint would remain busy for decades with numerous successes even if her career would never quite match the quality of her extraordinary mid-’50s run. She had already begun winding down her output to raise the two children she had with the husband she married in 1951, the director Jeffrey Hayden, and after All Fall Down her next few years would be focused on TV jobs and the occasional modest film like the 1964 spy thriller 36 Hours.
But then came anther flurry of big-screen activity, beginning with a role in her old friend Elizabeth Taylor’s The Sandpiper in 1965, Norman Jewison’s ensemble comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (’66), and John Frankenheimer’s hit race car drama Grand Priz (also ’66), in which Saint co-starred with James Garner.
There were sporadic film entries from the 1970s on, but most of Saint’s work during that era (and well into the 2000s) would be for television. There were the usual guest appearances on Love Boat and Moonlighting, but also memorable work in TV movies and miniseries. In 1981 Saint costarred with Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Best Little Girl in the World, a TV movie that was among the earliest films to deal with anorexia nervosa. Although much of its information about the disease would later be considered faulty, the film broke ground for dealing with the topic two years before the death of singer Karen Carpenter made the eating disorder common knowledge.
Five years later Saint returned to the big screen for the first time in more than a decade, playing the mother to Tom Hanks’ character in Garry Marshall’s Nothing in Common. In 1990 she won an Emmy Award for her performance as a rich, narcissistic woman in the NBC miniseries People Like Us, based on a novel by Dominick Dunne. At the end of the decade she appeared on Frasier as the mother of Roz Doyle, the radio producer played by series regular Peri Gilpin.
In all, Saint received three other Emmy nominations for her work, including for her role in the 1978 Hallmark Hall of Fame entry Taxi!!!, and 1977’s ABC Western miniseries How the West Was Won.
Her many other TV appearances included Fatal Vision (1984), A Year in the Life (1986), The Last Days Of Patton (1986), Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair (1990), My Antonia (1995), After Jimmy (1996), the Titanic mini-series (1996), Time To Say Goodbye? (1997) and Open House (2003). She also starred in four memorable holiday specials, A Christmas to Remember (1978), Breaking Home Ties (1987), I’ll Be Home for Christmas (1988) and Papa’s Angels (2000). She also was a recurring character in the animated series The Legend of Korra (2012).
Film credits in the last decades of her long career included 2005’s Because of the Winn-Dixie, 2006’s Superman Returns, 2014’s Winter’s Tale and, in 2019, her final film, Mariette in Ecstasy.
In addition to The Trip to Bountiful, she starred on the New York stage in The Lincoln Mask and Duet for One, and on major stages across America. She co-starred with Henry Fonda in First Monday In October in Chicago and Los Angeles, and starred in Summer and Smoke and Desire Under The Elms at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Other stage credits included The Rainmaker, Candida, Winesburg, Ohio, The Fatal Weakness and The Country Girl, for which she received the L.A. Dramalogue Award. She also co-starred in a production of Death of a Salesman with Judd Hirsch.
Saint and her husband, the director Jeffrey Hayden, produced a critically acclaimed production of August Wilson’s Fences (directed by Hayden) at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles in Summer 2006. The couple regularly performed A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters as well as an evening of Willa Cather’s On The Divide in theaters around the country.
Saint and Hayden also produced the PBS television documentaries Primary Colors: The Story of Corita (1991), which she narrated, and Children in America’s Schools with Bill Moyers (1996) for which they won an Emmy.
Among her many charitable works, Saint had been a longtime supporter of the Motion Picture and Television Fund and the Epilepsy Foundation of Los Angeles. She was an early proponent of making cars cell-phone-free and created and distributed her own bumper sticker: “Get Off The Phone Or Get Off The Road.” In addition, she served on the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
At the age of 93 in 2018, Saint, who had been so memorably attired in her classic films, appeared at the 90th Academy Awards ceremony to present the Oscar for Best Costume Design (Phantom Thread won). Greeted with an enthusiastic audience response, she said, “That means so much to me, having lost my husband last year after 65 years. We would come to this Academy every year, and I miss him, and that made up for it. It was so loud I know he heard it.”
“And,” she continued, “I just realized something. I’m older than the Academy. Plus four months, maybe five. I’m very proud of that. Just keep moving.”
Saint is survived by her two children, Darrell and Laurette; grandchildren Eli, Tyler, Molly and Stella; and great-grandchildren Arlo and Finley. Her husband of 65 years, Jeffrey Hayden, died in December 2016.
