Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress who starred in On the Waterfrontand North by Northwest, has died at the age of 102.
She died on Tuesday, 6 October, at her home in Los Angeles, according to family representative Jeff Sanderson.
Saint won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her very first film role, playing Edie Doyle opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront.
She was only the fourth performer to win that category for a screen debut, and she collected the statuette while visibly pregnant.
The film took eight Oscars in all, including best picture, and until her death she was the oldest living Academy Award winner.
Five years later she starred as the mysterious Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest, a role that turned the director’s usual cool blonde into something sharper and more knowing.
It remains one of the defining films of Hitchcock’s career.
Her work spanned seven decades across film, television and stage, and she was among the first breakout stars of early television.
She won an Emmy for the 1990 miniseries People Like Us, played Martha Kent in Superman Returnsand had a recurring role as Cybill Shepherd’s mother on Moonlighting.
She hosted a TCM documentary on the making of North by Northwestin 2000 and returned to the Oscars stage in 2009 to present the supporting actress award, some 55 years after her own win.
Her acting career continued well into her 90s, and she gave much of her memorabilia to the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, on 4 July 1924, Saint studied at Bowling Green State University in Ohio before moving to New York, where she worked as a model and an NBC page while pursuing acting.
She settled in Los Angeles in 1956.
She married director and producer Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, and they stayed together for 65 years until his death in 2016.
She is survived by her two children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
2026-10-07 05:19:00
