Eva Marie Saint, a graceful actor best known for her Oscar-winning film debut in “On the Waterfront” and for her turn as a sultry spy in another 1950s film classic “North by Northwest,” died Tuesday. She was 102.
Saint died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles.
Plucked from the Broadway stage by director Elia Kazan to portray Marlon Brando’s love interest in 1954’s “On the Waterfront,” Saint emerged a star.
After Cary Grant dangled her from Mt. Rushmore in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest,” she continued to appear opposite some of Hollywood’s biggest heartthrobs — including Paul Newman in “Exodus” (1960), Yves Montand in “Grand Prix” (1966) and Gregory Peck in “The Stalking Moon” (1969).
Groomed for stardom in the 1950s as a “luminous blond leading lady,” she found “few vehicles worthy of her talents,” film critic Leonard Maltin wrote in his “Movie Encyclopedia.”
But Saint gave another, more personal reason for her career trajectory.
“I was having children, I was turning things down and my agent said, ‘Eva Marie, you’ll never be a superstar’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to be a superstar,’” she often recounted.
When the movie roles faded — she only made about 20 films in more than 50 years — she found regular work on television beginning in the 1970s.
“As I got older, there weren’t that many roles,” she said matter-of-factly in a 1990 Times interview. “I segued into TV and am perfectly happy.”
She had a recurring role as Cybill Shepherd’s mother on the 1980s TV series “Moonlighting” and received an Emmy Award for playing a wealthy, self-centered woman who disowns her daughter in the 1990 miniseries “People Like Us.”
More recently, she appeared in “Don’t Come Knocking” with Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard in 2005, the same year she made “Because of Winn-Dixie” with Jeff Daniels and Cicely Tyson. In 2006, she played the adoptive mother of the Man of Steel in “Superman Returns.” This year she had a cameo in Akiva Goldsman’s romantic fantasy “Winter’s Tale.”
Before coming to Hollywood in the 1950s, Saint acted in TV dramas, including portraying a young woman who befriends an elderly woman (Lillian Gish) in Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.”
When a theatrical version of “Bountiful” opened in 1953 on Broadway, both women had starring roles and developed a close friendship. After director Kazan saw Saint’s stage performance, he cast her as Edie Doyle, Brando’s tough girlfriend in “On the Waterfront.”
Brando was the finest actor she ever worked with, Saint later said. She called him “just a genius” and a “prince” who would put his jacket around her shoulders to protect her from the cold while they shot scenes on the Hoboken, N.J., waterfront.
“Working with him was really very interesting because little things would happen, and when he was saying his lines, it changed your reaction so it was always, always fresh,” she told NBC News in 2006.
Upon accepting her Oscar for supporting actress for the film, the nine-months pregnant Saint kissed the statuette and joked, “I may have the baby right here.”
Two days after the Academy Awards ceremony in 1955, Saint did give birth to a son, the first of her two children. Three weeks later, the actress started work on “North by Northwest” in a part she often referred to as “the sexy spy lady,” a role that she said she loved.
Hitchcock gave little direction to her as an actor, she said in a 2000 National Public Radio interview, except to say, “‘Lower your voice, don’t use your hands … and look directly into Cary Grant’s eyes all the time,’ which was not difficult.”
The climactic Mt. Rushmore scene was filmed on a miniature version of the monument. When Saint slipped and hurt her arm, the Method actress said she decided to use the pain and can be seen rubbing her elbow in the film.
Only after Hitchcock had chosen her to portray the elegant spy Eve Kendall and called her “sexy, dangerous, mysterious and alluring,” did she believe it, she often said, even though her TV director husband had been telling her that for years.
Born July 4, 1924, in Newark, N.J., she grew up near Albany, N.Y., the younger of two daughters of John Merle Saint and the former Eva Marie Rice.
Her mother was a schoolteacher and her Quaker father was an executive with the B.F. Goodrich Co. Her sister, Adelaide, became a research chemist.
At Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Saint switched from training to be a teacher to majoring in drama.
On a dare from a friend, she tried out for a role as a vivacious Hollywood star in a college play, a part so different from the painstakingly shy Saint that “I don’t even think the dean knew that was me up there,” she told the Richmond, Va., Times Dispatch in 1996.
Hooked on acting, she began modeling and making commercials. Her first was for Keds sneakers.
After graduating from college in 1946, she lived with her family on Long Island in New York, appearing in commercials and acting in radio serials. Eventually, Saint found steady work on radio serials and early television dramas.
By 1948, she was taking classes at the Actors Studio in New York and met Jeffrey Hayden, who went on to have a lengthy career as a TV director. After they married in 1951, he counseled her to reach for more substantive roles, The Times reported in 1978.
“Her rare combination of fire and ice, youthful innocence and professional skill brought leads on ‘Studio One,’ ‘Kraft Theatre’ and the ‘Philco-Goodyear Playhouse,’“ live TV dramas from the 1950s, according to the 1978 article.
As she raised her children in a sprawling ranch house in Mandeville Canyon, she was selective about the roles she took. After her daughter and son grew up, Saint and her husband downsized to a stylish, art-laden condominium in Westwood in the mid-1970s.
The couple developed an enduring affection for the writing of Willa Cather when they were invited in 1990 to give a reading at the author’s childhood home in Nebraska. From that evening, they came up with a show featuring Cather’s work that they took on the road for decades.
“Family always came first,” she told Moving Pictures Magazine in 2006. When she was working out the deal to appear in “Exodus,” she told director Otto Preminger that she would not leave her two young children behind.
“I said to Otto, ‘I’ll have to bring my folks from Pennsylvania, and Jeff is coming and his mother,’ and Otto said, ‘Well, it looks like you’ll have your own Exodus going.’”
Saint is survived by her children, Darrell and Laurette; four grandchildren, Eli, Tyler, Molly and Stella; and two great grandchildren, Arlo and Finley. Her husband died in 2016.
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