Eva Marie Saint, the American actress and film producer known for her roles in On The Waterfront and North By Northwest, has died. Her death was confirmed in Variety, which reported that she died in her home this morning. She was 102 years old.
Throughout her career, her fans saw Saint as Hollywood royalty. But she refused to fully “go Hollywood,” as she recounted in a 2014 interview with CBS. In that interview, she discussed her insistence on striking a work-life balance in an era when the term “work-life balance” wasn’t yet coined. “I had an agent once who wanted me to make many more movies. I said, ‘I can’t. I can only do one a year, if that. I have children, young children’,” said Saint. “And he said, ‘Well, I guess you won’t be a superstar.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess not.'” “And what happened to that agent?” asked the interviewer. “Fired him,” said Saint.
Saint was born in 1924 in Newark, New Jersey, and attended high school in Delmar, New York. For college she left the east coast and attended Bowling Green State University in Ohio. There, she became an active member in the theater and honed an interest in acting. After college, Saint moved to New York City, where she worked as a model, aspiring actress and NBC page. The connection to NBC helped her pivot to minor roles on live 1940s television, such as game show Campus Hoopla and the soap opera One Man’s Family.
She enjoyed her work during this period, but it wasn’t without its share of mishaps. Speaking in a 2014 Los Angeles Times interview, Saint recalled an embarrassing incident during a live broadcast of One Man’s Family. Clad in a swimsuit for a pool scene, Saint was so focused on her role that she neglected to notice her top had slipped down. “I looked down and my boobies were showing coast to coast,” Saint said, laughing. “I just kept in the scene and slid under the water. What else could I do? It was live television. To this day, all of these years later, someone will say to me, ‘Miss Saint, you were doing One Man’s Family” … and I’ll say, ‘Yes, I remember.”‘
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Saint also made her way to Broadway, notably appearing in the Horton Foote play The Trip To Bountiful alongside heavy-hitters Lillian Gish and Jo Van Fleet. In the mid-1950s, she began racking up Emmy nominations for roles in The Philco Television Playhouse and Our Town. In 1951 she married television producer Jeffrey Hayden, who was to become her husband of 65 years until his death in 2016.
In 1954, Saint starred in On the Waterfront, the critically acclaimed Elia Kazan film that would launch her film career. Kazan cast her as Edie Doyle, choosing the relative newcomer over many other more established actresses. She brought a tender earnestness to the role captured in her memory of the audition, which she described in a 2000 interview for Premiere magazine. “Kazan put me in a room with Marlon Brando. He said ‘Brando is the boyfriend of your sister. You’re not used to being with a young man. Don’t let him in the door under any circumstances.’ I don’t know what he told Marlon; you’ll have to ask him – good luck! [Brando] came in and started teasing me. He put me off balance. And I remained off balance for the whole shoot.”
The late 1950s were a busy time for Saint, whose career was just beginning to rise. She starred in a number of heavy dramas, including 1957’s double-header of A Hatful Of Rain, an early drug-addiction picture, and Raintree Country, a Civil War epic. In 1959, Alfred Hitchcock cast against type, choosing Saint for the femme fatale role of Eve Kendall in North by Northwest. Hitchcock decided to bob Saint’s hair, worked with the actress to drop her voice into the husky and seductive range and coached her to play for mystery opposite Cary Grant.
Following North By Northwest, Saint chose to limit her work to one picture a year in order to spend more time with her husband and their two children. She worked regularly throughout the 1960s and 1970s in films such as Exodus (1960) with Paul Newman, 36 Hours (1965) with James Garner and Loving (1970), a critically praised performance. Although she never achieved the heights of stardom that marked her early career, she continued to act for decades to come on the stage, small screen and silver screen. From 2012 until 2014 she leant her voice to the television series The Legend Of Korra and in 2014, acted in the film Winter’s Tale.
Speaking to Saint’s scandal-free existence, the 2014 CBS interviewer remarked, “If you wrote a book, it should be titled, ‘How to Make It in Hollywood and Be a Normal Person.'” Saint replied, “It would never sell. You know why? Because I don’t think a lot of people, when they associate you with Hollywood, they don’t want to think of you as normal. They want to hear, you know, all the stuff in Hollywood.”
Saint is survived by her two children, four grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.
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