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Eva Marie Saint, 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.
Saint died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, a family spokesperson announced.
In 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), and stood out as Montgomery Clift’s jilted sweetheart in the Civil War-set drama Raintree Country. Both dramas were released in 1957.
Her résumé also included That Certain Feeling (1956) with Bob Hope, Exodus (1960) with Paul Newman, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) with Carl Reiner, 36 Hours (1964) and Grand Prix (1966) — both with James Garner — The Sandpiper (1965) with Richard Burton and Raintree co-star Elizabeth Taylor and The Stalking Moon (1968) with Gregory Peck.
And she played the mother of Cybill Shepherd’s character on the hit 1980s ABC series Moonlighting.
In 1953, Saint was cast in a live production of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful for NBC’s 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, who were then casting On the Waterfront, written by Budd Schulberg.
They had Saint read lines and improvise a scene with Marlon Brando, who was already set as boxer-turned-dockhand Terry Malloy. The chemistry was immediate, but she didn’t realize that she had won the coveted part of Edie Doyle until an assistant director called to tell her to appear for costume fittings.
For 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.
She accepted the trophy in New York (the Oscars were bicoastal then), celebrated with “a Chinese dinner and a few beers” and two days later gave birth to her first child, Darrell.
Saint described how it was to work with Kazan in a 2010 interview with The Santa Barbara Independent.
“My first scene is on top of the tenement house with the pigeon coops when I give [Brando] my brother’s coat,” she recalled. “Kazan took me aside and said, ‘Now, Eva Marie, you’re a Catholic girl who hasn’t had much experience with the opposite sex, so this is terrifying for you.’ He would give you really specific things to think about, but I never knew what he was saying to the other actors.
“He said, ‘Behind every pigeon coop could be a ferocious animal. I want you to remember where you are — you’ve never been on a roof like this before with a young man at night.’ He went on and on, giving me all these images, but I’m thinking to myself, ‘You don’t have to tell me to be nervous, because I’m already so nervous.’ My real nervousness actually helped the scene because the character herself was feeling the same way. I didn’t have to visualize any animals.”
In the Alfred Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest (1959), Saint’s Eve Kendall (the “cool blonde,” in the Hitchcockean vernacular) offers to help advertising exec Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), who’s on the run from good guys and bad in a case of mistaken identity. He doesn’t realize that she’s on the side of a ruthless spy (James Mason).
Hitchcock famously went shopping with her at Bergdorf Goodman and allowed her to pick out the clothes she would wear in the film.
“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 told Vanity Fair in 2014. “And 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.”
She shunned the big screen in the early 1970s and said she never wanted to be a superstar.
Saint 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.
Saint 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.
“Something started in my mind that got me thinking, ‘This was really exciting,’ ” she told the Independent.
At Bowling Green, Saint was named “queen” of practically everything — 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.)
Saint made her professional debut in late 1946 on a variety program called The Borden Show, receiving $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.
At the time, Saint also was modeling and taking classes at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, learning alongside future Waterfront co-stars Karl Malden and Rod Steiger as well as Julie Harris and Ben Gazzara. She became active in radio and TV, working on such popular soaps as Young Dr. Malone and One Man’s Family.
Parts 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 “Helen Hayes of television,” and she scored a couple of Emmy nominations.
She won the part of Lieutenant Ann Girard in the play Mister Roberts, which starred Henry Fonda 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 “looked too innocent.” That served as a valuable lesson in how to deal with rejection.
She fired her agent and cut back on her movie career after starring opposite George Segal in Loving (1970), choosing to concentrate on raising Darrell and her daughter, Laurette, with her late husband, director-producer Jeffrey Hayden, whom she met on the NYC subway and married in 1951. (They were together until his death in December 2016.)
She 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 — but a mistake was made and they were there.
“My daughter thought that I was really screaming and that Yves Montand [playing driver Jean-Pierre Sarti] was really dead,” she said. “She’s 60 now, and I still have horrible thoughts about that day.”
Saint received Emmy noms for her work in 1977’s How the West Was Won and the 1978 telefilm Taxi!! (it’s just Martin Sheen as a cab driver and Saint as his passenger), and she won in 1990 for playing a snooty matriarch in NBC’s adaptation of Dominick Dunne’s People Like Us.
Saint 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.
She returned to the big screen for the first time in more than a decade as Tom Hanks’ mother in Nothing in Common (1986). Most recently, she played Sam Shepard’s mom in Don’t Come Knocking (2005), was Martha Kent in Superman Returns (2006), appeared in Akiva Goldsman’s Winter’s Tale (2014) and did voice work for the Nickelodeon series The Legend of Korra.
The actress donated much of her memorabilia to the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library.
In addition to her kids, survivors include her grandchildren, Eli, Stella, Tyler and Molly, and her great-grandchildren, Arlo and Finley.
English (US) ·