Eva Marie Saint, who won an Academy Award in 1955 for her gripping movie debut as the shy love interest of Marlon Brando’s longshoreman in On the Waterfront, and who proved equally convincing as a stylish siren opposite Cary Grant in the romantic Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest, died on October 6th at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102.
Blonde and delicately beautiful – as a child, she played an angel in school pageants – Saint had been a working actor for eight years by the time she made her first movie. She learned her craft on live television dramas – which, with their three cameras and constant tumult, forced her to learn to concentrate, she said.
Her supporting performance in On the Waterfront, which boasted one of the most impressive casts and crews ever assembled, would alone have assured her a place in movie history; the movie remains near the top of the American Film Institute’s list of the country’s greatest films. It won the Oscar for best picture and director (for Elia Kazan), and Brando took home the award for best actor, for his tormented performance as a former prizefighter who moonlights as muscle for a corrupt union.
Even if Brando had the most indelible lines (“I coulda been a contender”), Budd Schulberg, who won the screenwriting Oscar, said Saint had the riskiest assignment – portraying a convent-educated young woman, Edie, who simmers with passion for Brando’s Terry Malloy. Edie, who discovers Terry played a role in the death of her brother, who had run afoul of union racketeers, plays a critical role in waking his conscience.
Kazan said he selected Saint from among hundreds of actors for her ability to convey the “simplicity and faith that well-brought-up Catholic girls have,” but he noted she also brought an explosive capacity for lust and an ability to keep up with Brando, a master of improvisation.
Nine months pregnant with her first child when she picked up her Oscar at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, she told the audience, “I’m so excited I may have the baby right here.” Her son was born two days later.
Stardom beckoned, but Saint decided to raise a family and to make only one movie a year while her two children were growing up. She later recalled turning down a three-picture deal that her agent promised would make her “a superstar.” What she preferred, she reflected in 1996 to the Hollywood interviewers David Fantle and Tom Johnson, was “to be a working actress with a home life that worked.”
Father Barry (Karl Malden) realises that Terry (Marlon Brando) will be all right after a brutal beating by a waterfront racketeer, as Edie (Eva Marie Saint) stands by in the 1954 film On the Waterfront. Photograph: Bettmann Archive
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Nevertheless, Saint had a fruitful and celebrated career. Almost as acclaimed as her work in On the Waterfront was her performance as a seductive mystery woman opposite Grant in North by Northwest (1959), which is also on the AFI list.
As Grant’s Madison Avenue executive finds himself on the run, falsely accused of committing a high-profile murder, he finds himself seated in a train dining car with Saint. In a twist, and to his delight, she is the sexual aggressor.
“It’s going to be a long night,” she tells him. “And I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started. You know what I mean?”
In later years, she said some of the easiest work in her entire professional life involved the many retakes required to film their kissing scenes.
Most of Saint’s performances were intensely dramatic. She played the steadfast wife of a drug addict (Don Murray) in A Hatful of Rain (1957); the childhood sweetheart who loses Montgomery Clift to Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County (1957); the widowed American nurse who falls in love with a Jewish warrior (Paul Newman) during the fight to create the state of Israel in Exodus (1960); and the older woman who is bedded and betrayed by a young drifter (Warren Beatty) in All Fall Down (1962).
When given the chance, though, Saint proved a deft comic actor, playing a secretary still half in love with her ex-husband (Bob Hope) in That Certain Feeling (1956) and Carl Reiner’s wife in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), a Cold War farce about a New England town that thinks it’s being invaded by the Soviets.
Cary Grant holding Eva Marie Saint in a scene from the 1959 film North by Northwest. Photograph: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images
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In the 1970s, when movie work grew increasingly scarce, Saint, always level-headed and pragmatic, returned happily and successfully to television. She starred in TV movies; played Cybill Shepherd’s mother in the late 1980s on the ABC comedy-drama series Moonlighting; and won an Emmy in 1990 as a nasty dowager in the NBC version of Dominick Dunne’s biting novel about the upper crust, People Like Us.
Eva Marie Saint, the younger of two daughters, was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on July 4, 1924, and grew up in Delmar, New York.
Her father, John Merle Saint, was an executive with BF Goodrich, the tyre manufacturer. Her mother, Eva Marie (Rice) Saint, had been a schoolteacher.
She was a calm, almost grave, child, her mother told Cosmopolitan magazine in 1954; she thought her daughter had inherited her “serenity” from her father, a Quaker.
Becoming an actor was almost accidental. Saint followed her older sister, Adelaide, to Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and almost immediately found herself cast as the lead in college plays. Stunningly attractive, she was also voted “Sweater Queen” and “May Queen” by her fellow students.
She graduated in 1946 with a bachelor’s degree in speech. (The university named a theatre after her in 2012.) New York and television were the next step. Her early roles included playing a singing cheerleader in a tennis shoe commercial and, more notably, making an appearance on Studio One in the Ring Lardner-George S Kaufman play June Moon in 1949, opposite another young hopeful, Jack Lemmon.
Playing the rebellious daughter Claudia for two years on the prime time television version of the radio soap opera One Man’s Family earned her good money but left her discontented.
Eva Marie Saint with her husband, Jeffrey Hayden, in 1957. Photograph: Harold P Matosian/AP
An equally discontented aspiring director, Jeffrey Hayden, invited her to lunch; they married in 1951. In the fourth decade of her marriage to Hayden, who had a long career as a television director, Saint told The Los Angeles Times: “I really don’t wake up every morning and say, ‘Well, now, isn’t this unusual? I’m sleeping with the same man after 43 years.’ I do say that you work at marriage. It doesn’t just happen.”
Hayden died in 2016 at 90. Saint is survived by their two children, Darrell and Laurette; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
To a torrent of critical acclaim, Saint starred with Lillian Gish in Horton Foote’s 1953 television play The Trip to Bountiful, as a young woman befriended by an older one on a long bus ride. When The Trip to Bountiful moved to Broadway later in 1953, it was a commercial failure, but Kazan and Schulberg were in the audience at one of its 39 performances.
Eva Marie Saint has died aged 102. Photograph: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
Foote said her “ability to transmit an inner purity” made her right for the part in Bountiful, and that same quality, Kazan and Schulberg concurred, made her ideal for On the Waterfront.
Well into her later years, Saint was still a working actor. She played Superman’s foster mother, Martha Kent, in the movie Superman Returns (2006) and had a central role as a spinster librarian opposite a 10-year-old girl and a dog in Because of Winn-Dixie (2005). One of her last movie appearances was in the fantasy Winter’s Tale, based on the Mark Helprin novel, in 2014.
Asked in an interview for Vanity Fair in 2011 if she ever watched her own films, Saint replied: “Sometimes I do. And I think, ‘Well, gee. You did that? Good job!’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.