Oscar-Winning Hollywood Legend Eva Marie Saint Dies at 102
Pecohub Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress who starred in Hollywood classics such as On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, has died aged 102.
Saint won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her movie debut in director Elia Kazan’s 1954 crime drama, On the Waterfront; playing Edie Doyle, the moral compass of the film and love interest of Marlon Brando’s conflicted boxer-turned-docker.
Five years later, she portrayed femme fatale Eve Kendall, dangerously seducing Cary Grant’s entangled advertising executive in Alfred Hitchcock’s spy thriller, North by Northwest.
She died on Tuesday of natural causes, surrounded by family and loved ones at her home in Los Angeles, family representative Jeff Sanderson confirmed.
Until her death, Saint was the oldest surviving Oscar winner and one of the last remaining stars of Hollywood’s golden age.
Starting her career in live television in the late 1940s, she also won an Emmy Award in 1990 for her career-capping role as the rich widow Lil Van Degan Altemus in People Like Us.
Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1924, Saint had originally intended to become a teacher before developing a passion for theatre.
She trained in New York at the Herbert Berghof Studio and then the Actors Studio – the home of method acting – co-founded by Kazan.
Saint burst on to the Hollywood scene with her performance as the gentle but resolute Edie in Kazan’s classic, On the Waterfront.
Her co-star Brando was an intense method actor and Saint admitted to having found him “adorable” but “a little frightening”.
