Eva Marie Saint, who won an Academy Award in her 1954 gripping movie debut — as the shy love interest of Marlon Brando’s longshoreman in “On the Waterfront” — and who proved equally convincing as a stylish siren opposite Cary Grant in the romantic thriller “North by Northwest,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102.
A family representative, Jeff Sanderson, confirmed the death.
Blonde and delicately beautiful — as a child she played an angel in school pageants — Ms. Saint had been a working actress for eight years by the time she made her first movie. She learned her craft on live television dramas — which, with its three cameras and constant tumult, forced her to learn to concentrate, she said.
Her supporting performance alone in “On the Waterfront,” which boasted one of the most impressive casts and crews ever assembled, would have assured her a place in movie history; it remains near the top of the American Film Institute’s greatest American films ever made. It won the Oscar for best picture and director (for Elia Kazan), and Mr. Brando took home the award for best actor, for his tormented performance as a former prizefighter who moonlights as muscle for a corrupt union.
Even if Mr. Brando had the most indelible lines (“I coulda been a contender”), Budd Schulberg, who won the screenwriting Oscar, said Ms. Saint had the riskiest assignment — portraying a convent-educated young woman, Edie, who simmers with passion for Mr. Brando’s Terry Malloy. Edie, who discovers Terry played a role in the death of her brother, who had run afoul of union racketeers, plays a critical role waking Malloy’s conscience.
Mr. Kazan said he selected Ms. Saint among hundreds of other actresses for her ability to convey “simplicity and faith that well-brought-up Catholic girls have,” but noted that she also brought an explosive capacity for lust and an ability to keep up with Mr. Brando, a master of improvisation.
“In casting Eva Marie Saint,” the film critic A.H. Weiler wrote in The New York Times, “Mr. Kazan has come up with a pretty and blonde artisan who does not have to depend on these attributes. Her parochial school training is no bar to love with the proper stranger. Amid scenes of carnage, she gives tenderness and sensitivity to genuine romance.”
Nine months pregnant with her first child when she picked up her Oscar at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood, she told the audience, “I’m so excited I may have the baby right here.” Her son was born two days later.
Stardom beckoned, but Ms. Saint decided to raise a family and to make only one movie a year while her two children were growing up. She later recalled turning down a three-picture deal that her agent promised would make her “a superstar.” What she preferred, she reflected in 1996 to the Hollywood interviewers David Fantle and Tom Johnson, was “to be a working actress with a home life that worked.”
“I have a life, and it is not lived on the set,” she told them. “I felt that way when I was raising my kids, and I feel that way now. I don’t want make-believe children. When Donna Reed, the perfect American mother to millions of TV viewers in the 1950s, ended her show, her children were teenagers. She said to me, ‘Now I’m going to get to know my kids.’ I thought that was so very sad.”
Nevertheless, Ms. Saint had a fruitful and celebrated career. Almost as acclaimed as her work in “On the Waterfront” was her performance as a seductive mystery woman opposite Mr. Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (1959), which is also on the A.F.I. list.
As Mr. Grant’s Madison Avenue executive finds himself on the run falsely accused of committing a high-profile murder, he finds himself seated on a train dining car with Ms. Saint. In a twist, and to his delight, she is the sexual aggressor.
“It’s going to be a long night,” she tells him. “And I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started. You know what I mean?”
In later years, she said some of the easiest work in her entire professional life involved the many retakes required to film their kissing scenes.
Most of Ms. Saint’s performances were intensely dramatic. She played the steadfast wife of a drug addict (Don Murray) in “A Hatful of Rain” (1957); the childhood sweetheart who loses Montgomery Clift to Elizabeth Taylor in “Raintree County” (1957); the widowed American nurse who falls in love with a Jewish warrior (Paul Newman) during the fight to create the state of Israel in “Exodus” (1960); and the older woman who is bedded and betrayed by a young drifter (Warren Beatty) in “All Fall Down” (1962).
Portraying the wife of a mediocre artist (George Segal) who is about to run away with another woman in “Loving” (1970), Ms. Saint gave what the critic Pauline Kael called a “stunning performance in what might have been a cliché role.”
“It’s wonderful to see what reserves of talent performers can sometimes draw upon when they get the chance,” she wrote, noting her ability to turn her character’s “humiliating position” into one of unexpected poignancy.
When given the chance, Ms. Saint proved a deft comic actress, playing a secretary still half in love with her ex-husband (Bob Hope) in “That Certain Feeling” (1956) and as Carl Reiner’s wife in “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” (1966), a Cold War farce about a New England town that thinks it’s being invaded by the Soviets.
In the 1970s, when movie work grew increasingly scarce, Ms. Saint, always levelheaded and pragmatic, returned happily and successfully to television. She starred in TV movies, played Cybill Shepherd’s mother in the late 1980s on the ABC comedy-drama series “Moonlighting” and won an Emmy Award in 1990 as a nasty dowager in the NBC-TV version of Dominick Dunne’s biting novel about the upper crust, “People Like Us.”
Eva Marie Saint, the younger of two daughters, was born in East Orange, N.J., on July 4, 1924, and grew up in Delmar, N.Y.
Her father, John Merle Saint, was an executive with B.F. Goodrich, the tire manufacturer. Her mother, Eva Marie (Rice) Saint, had been a schoolteacher. She was a calm, almost grave, child, her mother told Cosmopolitan magazine in 1954; she thought her daughter had inherited her “serenity” from her father, a Quaker.
Becoming an actress was almost accidental. Ms. Saint followed her older sister, Adelaide, to Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and almost immediately found herself cast as the lead in college plays. Stunningly attractive, she was also voted “Sweater Queen” and “May Queen” by students.
She graduated in 1946 with a bachelor’s degree in speech. (The university named a theater after her in 2012.) New York, and television, were the next step. Early roles included playing a singing cheerleader in a tennis shoe commercial and, more notably, an appearance on “Studio One” in the Ring Lardner-George S. Kaufman play “June Moon” in 1949, opposite another young hopeful, Jack Lemmon.
Playing the rebellious daughter Claudia for two years on the prime-time television version of the radio soap opera “One Man’s Family” earned her good money but left her discontented.
An equally discontented aspiring director, Jeffrey Hayden, invited her to lunch; they married in 1951. In the fourth decade of her marriage to Mr. Hayden, who had a long career as a television director, Ms. Saint told The Los Angeles Times: “I really don’t wake up every morning and say, ‘Well, now, isn’t this unusual? I’m sleeping with the same man after 43 years.’ I do say that you work at marriage. It doesn’t just happen.”
Mr. Hayden died in 2016 at 90. She is survived by their two children, Darrell and Laurette; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
To a torrent of critical acclaim, Ms. Saint starred with Lillian Gish in Horton Foote’s 1953 television play “The Trip to Bountiful,” as a young woman befriended by an older one on a long bus ride. When “The Trip to Bountiful” moved to Broadway later in 1953, it was a commercial failure, but Mr. Kazan and Mr. Schulberg were in the audience at one of its 39 performances.
Mr. Foote said her “ability to transmit an inner purity” made her right for the part in “Bountiful,” and that same quality, Mr. Kazan and Mr. Schulberg concurred, made her ideal for “On the Waterfront.”
Among Ms. Saint’s other movies were “36 Hours” (1964), a World War II drama co-starring James Garner, and “The Sandpiper” (1965), in which she loses the man she loves (Mr. Burton, as her husband and an Episcopal clergyman) to a freethinking artist (Ms. Taylor). She was a prisoner rescued by an Army scout (Gregory Peck) and then followed along the western frontier by her renegade Apache captor in “The Stalking Moon” (1968).
Well into her later years, Ms. Saint was still a working actress. She played Superman’s foster mother, Martha Kent, in the movie “Superman Returns” (2006) and had a central role as a spinster librarian opposite a 10-year-old girl and a dog in “Because of Winn-Dixie” (2005). One of her last movie appearances was in the fantasy “Winter’s Tale,” based on the Mark Helprin novel, in 2014.
Asked in an interview for Vanity Fair in 2011 if she ever watched her own films, Ms. Saint replied: “Sometimes I do. And I think, well, gee. You did that? Good job!”
Adam Bernstein contributed reporting.
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