{"id":918765,"date":"2026-10-07T00:02:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T00:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/918765\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T00:02:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T00:02:08","slug":"eva-marie-saint-dead-on-the-waterfront-star-was-102","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/918765\/","title":{"rendered":"Eva Marie Saint Dead: ‘On the Waterfront’ Star Was 102"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEva Marie Saint<\/a>, the ethereal beauty who won the best supporting actress Oscar for her work in her first motion picture, On the Waterfront, then dazzled audiences as a double agent in North by Northwest, died Tuesday. She was 102.<\/p>\n

\n\tSaint died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, a family spokesperson announced.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn between her two great achievements on film, the luminous blonde starred in A Hatful of Rain, playing the pregnant wife of a war veteran and narcotics addict (Don Murray<\/a>), and stood out as Montgomery Clift\u2019s jilted sweetheart in the Civil War-set drama Raintree Country. Both dramas were released in 1957.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer r\u00e9sum\u00e9 also included That Certain Feeling (1956) with Bob Hope<\/a>, Exodus (1960) with Paul Newman<\/a>, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) with Carl Reiner<\/a>, 36 Hours (1964) and Grand Prix (1966) \u2014 both with James Garner<\/a> \u2014 The Sandpiper (1965) with Richard Burton<\/a> and Raintree co-star Elizabeth Taylor<\/a> and\u00a0The Stalking Moon (1968) with Gregory Peck<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd she played the mother of Cybill Shepherd\u2019s character on the hit 1980s ABC series Moonlighting.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1953, Saint was cast in a live production of Horton Foote\u2019s The Trip to Bountiful for NBC\u2019s Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, and executive producer Fred Coe brought the drama to Broadway. Saint played Thelma opposite Lillian Gish as Carrie Watts in both and attracted the attention of producer Sam Spiegel and director Elia Kazan<\/a>, who were then casting On the Waterfront, written by Budd Schulberg.<\/p>\n

\n\tThey had Saint read lines and improvise a scene with Marlon Brando<\/a>, who was already set as boxer-turned-dockhand Terry Malloy. The chemistry was immediate, but she didn\u2019t realize that she had won the coveted part of Edie Doyle until an assistant director called to tell her to appear for costume fittings.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor her portrayal of the virginal Catholic girl who persuades Terry to take a stand and make something of himself, Saint won the best supporting actress Oscar in 1955. Her Academy Award was one of eight collected by On the Waterfront that night, including best picture.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe accepted the trophy in New York<\/a> (the Oscars were bicoastal then), celebrated with \u201ca Chinese dinner and a few beers\u201d and two days later gave birth to her first child, Darrell.<\/p>\n

\n\tSaint described how it was to work with Kazan in a 2010\u00a0interview<\/a> with The Santa Barbara Independent.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy first scene is on top of the tenement house with the pigeon coops when I give [Brando] my brother\u2019s coat,\u201d she recalled. \u201cKazan took me aside and said, \u2018Now, Eva Marie, you\u2019re a Catholic girl who hasn\u2019t had much experience with the opposite sex, so this is terrifying for you.\u2019 He would give you really specific things to think about, but I never knew what he was saying to the other actors.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe said, \u2018Behind every pigeon coop could be a ferocious animal. I want you to remember where you are \u2014 you\u2019ve never been on a roof like this before with a young man at night.\u2019 He went on and on, giving me all these images, but I\u2019m thinking to myself, \u2018You don\u2019t have to tell me to be nervous, because I\u2019m already so nervous.\u2019 My real nervousness actually helped the scene because the character herself was feeling the same way. I didn\u2019t have to visualize any animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the Alfred Hitchcock<\/a> thriller North by Northwest (1959), Saint\u2019s Eve Kendall (the \u201ccool blonde,\u201d in the Hitchcockean vernacular) offers to help advertising exec Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant<\/a>), who\u2019s on the run from good guys and bad in a case of mistaken identity. He doesn\u2019t realize that she\u2019s on the side of a ruthless spy (James Mason).<\/p>\n

\n\tHitchcock famously went shopping with her at Bergdorf Goodman and allowed her to pick out the clothes she would wear in the film.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe didn\u2019t talk about acting. He worked with me from the outside in. My hair, my makeup, my shoes, my jewelry, my purse, my gloves, everything,\u201d she\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Vanity Fair in 2014. \u201cAnd just from creating that exterior for me, he gave me the sense of a spy lady. But we never talked about emotion. He told me not to use my hands, I have a habit of doing that, and to lower my voice. And always, in my scenes with Cary Grant, look directly into his eyes, which was not difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe shunned the big screen in the early 1970s and said she never wanted to be a superstar.<\/p>\n

\n\tSaint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, and raised near Albany, New York. Her father was a research chemist for B.F. Goodrich and her mother a teacher. In high school, she played field hockey, and her teacher predicted a brilliant acting career not for her but for her older sister, Adelaide.<\/p>\n

\n\tSaint followed her sister to Bowling Green State University in Ohio and majored in elementary education. On a dare, she tried out for a school play, the comedy Personal Appearance, and won the lead, playing a Hollywood siren. She switched her major to dramatics.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSomething started in my mind that got me thinking, \u2018This was really\u00a0exciting,\u2019 \u201d she told the Independent.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt Bowling Green, Saint was named \u201cqueen\u201d of practically everything \u2014 Dream Girl of the Freshman Class, Sweater Queen, etc. Upon receiving her B.A., she headed to New York, determined to make a living as an actress. (Years later, Bowling Green named a campus theater after her.)<\/p>\n

\n\tSaint made her professional debut in late 1946 on a variety program called The Borden Show,\u00a0receiving $10 to applaud off-camera. She played a cheerleader in a Keds sneakers commercial, then uttered two lines as a telephone operator on a 1947 radio soap opera called Rosemary.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the time, Saint also was modeling and taking classes at Lee Strasberg\u2019s Actors Studio, learning alongside future Waterfront co-stars Karl Malden and Rod Steiger as well as Julie Harris<\/a> and Ben Gazzara. She became active in radio and TV, working on such popular soaps as Young Dr. Malone and One Man\u2019s Family.<\/p>\n

\n\tParts in such TV anthology series as Studio One, Kraft Television Theatre and, most frequently, the Philco-Goodyear show, followed. Her solid performances on Philco caused one critic to call her the \u201cHelen Hayes of television,\u201d and she scored a couple of Emmy nominations.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe won the part of Lieutenant Ann Girard in the play Mister Roberts, which starred Henry Fonda<\/a> and debuted on Broadway in 1948, but was replaced while the show was testing before its move to New York because the producers thought she \u201clooked too innocent.\u201d That served as a valuable lesson in how to deal with rejection.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe fired her agent and cut back on her movie career after starring opposite George Segal<\/a> in Loving (1970), choosing to concentrate on raising Darrell and her daughter,\u00a0Laurette,\u00a0with her late husband, director-producer Jeffrey Hayden<\/a>, whom she met on the NYC subway and married in 1951. (They were together until his death in December 2016.)<\/p>\n

\n\tShe often took the whole family with her when she was filming overseas, like with Exodus and Grand Prix. During production of the latter, Saint recalled in April 2018 at the TCM Classic Film Festival, she told the woman who was taking care of her children not to bring them to the set for the tragic final scene \u2014 but a mistake was made and they were there.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy daughter thought that I was really screaming and that Yves Montand [playing driver Jean-Pierre Sarti] was really dead,\u201d she said. \u201cShe\u2019s 60 now, and I still have horrible thoughts about that day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSaint received Emmy noms for her work in 1977\u2019s How the West Was Won and the 1978 telefilm Taxi!! (it\u2019s just Martin Sheen as a cab driver and Saint as his passenger), and she won in 1990 for playing a snooty matriarch in NBC\u2019s adaptation of Dominick Dunne\u2019s People Like Us.<\/p>\n

\n\tSaint also starred in a dramatization of Winesburg, Ohio in Santa Barbara (she had a home in the area) under the direction of her husband, then toured nationally with the production.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe returned to the big screen for the first time in more than a decade as Tom Hanks\u2019 mother in Nothing in Common (1986). Most recently, she played Sam Shepard\u2019s mom in Don\u2019t Come Knocking (2005), was Martha Kent in Superman Returns (2006), appeared in Akiva Goldsman\u2019s Winter\u2019s Tale (2014) and did voice work for the Nickelodeon series The Legend of Korra.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe actress donated much of her memorabilia to the Academy\u2019s Margaret Herrick Library.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to her kids, survivors include her grandchildren, Eli, Stella, Tyler and Molly, and her great-grandchildren, Arlo and Finley. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eva Marie Saint, the ethereal beauty who won the best supporting actress Oscar for her work in her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":918766,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[26448,64,63,486873,486874,447,486875,119677,134,486876,144803,195444,186429,31481,76792,273380],"class_list":["post-918765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-alfred-hitchcock","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bob-hope","tag-cary-grant","tag-celebrities","tag-elia-kazan","tag-elizabeth-taylor","tag-entertainment","tag-eva-marie-saint","tag-gregory-peck","tag-henry-fonda","tag-marlon-brando","tag-obituaries","tag-paul-newman","tag-richard-burton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/918766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}