Photo: Getty Images Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story 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.
Expand Photo: Getty Images 1/15 c. 1954 On the set of On the Waterfront. In a 2010 interview , Saint called Marlon Brando “probably the finest actor I’ve ever worked with”—if also, in his later years, a bit of a cad. Remembering their final interaction, she said:
“Elizabeth Taylor was having a birthday party and he came into the room—I was so excited to see him. He came up, we hugged, and he saw a pretty young brunette over my shoulder. He said good-bye and that was the last time I ever saw him.”
Expand Photo: Getty Images 2/15 1956 With Bob Hope in the comedy That Certain Feeling .
Expand Photo: Getty Images 3/15 1957 With Don Murray in Fred Zinnemann’s A Hatful of Rain , adapted from Michael V. Gazzo’s 1955 play of the same name.
Expand Photo: Getty Images 4/15 1957 With Montgomery Clift, whom Saint later described as “such a sweet man, very quiet,” on the Indiana set of Raintree County.
Expand Photo: Getty Images 5/15 1959 On the North by Northwest set with Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, and others. In contrast to someone like Kazan, Saint later said that Hitchcock “didn’t get into the feelings or the depth of the character. It was how she looked, what she wore—the hair, the makeup, the color of the lipstick, the necklace, the gloves, everything about her.”
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