Eva Marie Saint has died: the star of “North by Northwest” and “On the Waterfront” has died

Eva Marie Saint, a graceful actress best known for her Oscar-winning film debut in “On the Waterfront” and for her role as a sultry spy in another 1950s cinema classic, “North by Northwest,” died Tuesday. She was 102 years old.

Saint died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles.

Brought off the Broadway stage by director Elia Kazan to play Marlon Brando’s love interest in 1954’s “On the Waterfront,” Saint became a star.

After Cary Grant hung her on Mount Rushmore in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest,” she continued to appear alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest idols, including Paul Newman in “Exodus” (1960), Yves Montand in “Grand Prix” (1966) and Gregory Peck in “The Stalking Moon” (1968).

Groomed for stardom in the 1950s as a “luminous blonde star,” she found “few vehicles worthy of her talents,” film critic Leonard Maltin wrote in his “Movie Encyclopedia.”

Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film classic, “North by Northwest.”

(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images)

But Saint gave another, more personal, reason to justify his professional career.

“I had kids, I was turning down offers and my agent told me, ‘Eva Marie, you’ll never be a superstar,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to be a superstar,’” she often said.

When film roles faded – she only made around 20 films in more than 50 years – she found regular work in television starting in the 1970s.

“As I got older, there weren’t a lot of roles,” she said matter-of-factly in a 1990 interview with The Times. “I moved into television and I’m perfectly happy with that.”

She had a recurring role as Cybill Shepherd’s mother in the 1980s television series “Moonlighting” and received an Emmy Award for playing a rich, self-centered woman who disowns her daughter in the 1990s miniseries “People Like Us.”

Most recently, she appeared in “Don’t Come Knocking” with Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard in 2005, the same year she directed “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”. In 2014, she made an appearance in Akiva Goldsman’s romantic fantasy, “Winter’s Tale.”

Before coming to Hollywood in the 1950s, Saint starred in television series, notably as a young woman who befriends an older woman (Lillian Gish) in Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.”

Eva Marie Saint and her husband Jeffrey Hayden in Los Angeles in 1959.

(Getty)

When a stage version of “Bountiful” premiered on Broadway in 1953, 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 best actor she ever worked with, Saint later said. She called him a “genius” and a “prince” who would put his jacket around her shoulders to protect her from the cold while they filmed scenes on the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey.

“Working with him was really, really interesting because little things would happen, and when he would say his lines, it would change your reaction, so it was always, always fresh,” she told NBC News in 2006.

Accepting her Supporting Actress Oscar for the film, Sainte, nine months pregnant, kissed the statuette and joked, “I could have the baby here.”

Two days after the Academy Awards in 1955, Saint gave birth to a son, the first of her two children. Three years later, the actor began working on “North by Northwest” in a role she said she loved and often referred to as “the sexy lady spy.”

Hitchcock gave her little direction as an actress, 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 wasn’t difficult.”

Eva Marie Saint around 1965.

(Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)

The climactic Mount Rushmore scene was filmed on a miniature version of the monument. When Saint slipped and injured her arm, the Method actor said she decided to use the pain and can be seen rubbing her elbow in the film.

It was only after Hitchcock cast her as the elegant spy Eve Kendall and called her “sexy, dangerous, mysterious and seductive” that she believed it, she often said, even though her television executive husband had been telling her so for years.

Born July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, she grew up near Albany, New York, the younger of two daughters of John Merle Saint and the former Eva Marie Rice.

His mother was a schoolteacher and his Quaker father was an executive at BF Goodrich Co. His sister, Adelaide, became a chemical researcher.

At Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Saint switched from training as a teacher to majoring in drama.

Following a challenge from a friend, she tried out for the role of a vivacious Hollywood star in a college play, a role so different from the extremely shy Saint that “I don’t even think the dean knew it was me up there,” she told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1996.

Addicted to acting, she began modeling and directing commercials. His first was for Keds sneakers.

After graduating from college in 1946, she lived with her family on New York’s Long Island, appearing in commercials and starring in radio serials. Eventually, Saint found steady work in radio serials and early television series.

In 1948, she took classes at the Actors Studio in New York and met Jeffrey Hayden, who would have a long career as a television director. After they married in 1951, he advised her to move on to bigger roles, the Times reported in 1978.

Eva Marie Saint and Paul Newman in 1960’s “Exodus.”

“His rare combination of fire and ice, youthful innocence and professional skills landed him leading roles in “Studio One,” “Kraft Theater” and “Philco-Goodyear Playhouse,” live-action television series of the 1950s, according to the 1978 article.

While she raised her children on a sprawling ranch in Mandeville Canyon, she was selective about the roles she took on. After her daughter and son grew up, Saint and her husband moved to an elegant, art-laden condominium in Westwood in the mid-1970s.

The couple developed a lasting affection for Willa Cather’s writing when they were invited in 1990 to give a reading at the author’s childhood home in Nebraska. From that evening, they envisioned 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. While preparing a deal to appear in “Exodus,” she told director Otto Preminger that she would not leave her two young children behind.

“I told Otto, ‘I’m going to have to bring my parents from Pennsylvania, and Jeff is coming with his mother,’ and Otto said, ‘Well, it looks like you’re going to have your own Exodus.'”

Saint is survived by his children, Darrell and Laurette; four grandchildren, Eli, Tyler, Molly and Stella; and two great-grandchildren, Arlo and Finley. Her husband died in 2016.