Eva Marie Saint, who won an Academy Award in her very first film role and went on to outrun a crop duster alongside Cary Grant in one of Hollywood's most famous thrillers, died at 102 at her home in Los Angeles. Her death was attributed to natural causes, and she was surrounded by family and loved ones at the time.
Her publicist, Jeff Sanderson, confirmed the death, according to CBS News. A family representative also confirmed the news to the New York Times. Saint was born July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, and trained at the Actors Studio in New York, where she studied under famed acting coach Lee Strasberg, founder of the storied workshop. She was also mentored by Lillian Gish, according to seed reporting from Reuters.
A Debut That Won an Oscar
Saint made her motion-picture debut as Edie Doyle in Elia Kazan's 1954 drama On the Waterfront, opposite Marlon Brando, per the same CBS News account. Kazan cast her in the role over Elizabeth Montgomery, according to Reuters. The performance earned Saint the Academy Award for best supporting actress at the 1955 ceremony, where she accepted her Oscar that March, as Reuters reported.
On the Waterfront swept eight Academy Awards, including best picture, with Kazan winning best director and Brando taking home best actor, according to Variety. The film remains near the top of the American Film Institute's list of the country's greatest films, the New York Times noted.
Facing Down Cary Grant and a Crop Duster
Five years after her Oscar win, Saint played spy Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 thriller North by Northwest, per CBS News. The suspenseful espionage picture became one of the era's defining chases, featuring a crop-dusting plane pursuing Grant across open farmland and a climactic sequence at Mount Rushmore, according to Reuters. The film received three Oscar nominations but did not win any Academy Awards, Reuters reported.
Saint's career stretched across nearly eighty years in movies, television, theater and radio, according to Turner Classic Movies. The Television Academy, in a feature on her six-decade run, described her as blending iconic feature-film performances with a robust body of television work. That small-screen work included a supporting actress Emmy in 1990 for the NBC miniseries People Like Us, Variety reported.
A Long Marriage and a Career Beyond the Big Screen
Saint married director-producer Jeffrey Hayden in 1951. Accounts of the marriage's length differ: CBS News reported the couple stayed together for 65 years until Hayden's death in 2016, while the Chicago Tribune put the figure at 55 years. The couple had two children together, and Reuters reported that Saint gave birth to son Darrell Hayden in 1955, reportedly telling someone at the time, “I may have the baby right here!” according to the same Reuters account. She is survived by her two children, Darrell and Laurette, along with four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, CBS News reported.
Later film credits included Otto Preminger's Exodus in 1960, John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down in 1962 and Grand Prix in 1966, Vincente Minnelli's The Sandpiper in 1965, and Norman Jewison's The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming in 1966, according to Reuters. She went on to appear in Because of Winn-Dixie in 2005 and as Martha Kent in Superman Returns in 2006, Variety reported. Her final big-screen appearance came in 2014's Winter's Tale, per the same Variety account. Despite the decades-spanning résumé, Saint turned down many roles to devote time to her family, Reuters noted — a choice reflected in a filmography that the Los Angeles Times counted at about 20 films over more than 50 years, while Turner Classic Movies put the number at 21 features since her 1954 debut.
