Eva Marie Saint, the Academy Award-winning star of such classic Hollywood films as On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, has died at the magisterial age of 102, according to a family representative.
Born in New Jersey on Independence Day, 1924, Saint studied acting in college at Bowling Green State University before beginning her career in television—as an NBC page. Yet it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that Saint saw her first real brushes with critical acclaim. In 1954, she won an Outer Critics Circle Award for her performance in The Trip to Bountiful on Broadway, and she received her first two Emmy nominations for her roles in teleplays: Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night in 1954 and a musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in 1955. (An Emmy win finally came in 1990, when she was recognized for her work in the television movie People Like Us.)
However, Saint is undoubtedly best remembered for her work in film, which she began in spectacular fashion with Elia Kazan’s 1954 drama On the Waterfront, opposite Marlon Brando. (In 1955, she would win the Oscar for best supporting actress for her turn as Edie Doyle.) What followed was a filmography crammed with all the great leading men of her time. In 1957, Saint starred with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in the historical epic Raintree County; in 1959, she led Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest with Cary Grant; Paul Newman—with whom she’d worked on that television production of Our Town—was her leading man in 1960’s Exodus; and she appeared with Warren Beatty in 1962’s All Fall Down and with Gregory Peck in the 1968 Western The Stalking Moon. (In her personal life, Saint was no less fortunate: She was married to television director and producer Jeffrey Hayden—with whom she shared two children—from 1951 until his death in 2016.)
Here, in honor of Saint’s astonishing life under Hollywood’s klieg lights, we look back at the movies—and the men—that populated her long career.
