Actress Eva Marie Saint, who won an Oscar for ‘On the Waterfront,’ dies at 102

On the Waterfront was Eva Marie Saint’s first film job after years of theater and TV.

Columbia TriStar/Getty Images

Columbia TriStar/Getty Images

Eva Marie Saint, who starred in Elia Kazan’s 1954 On the Waterfront and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest, died Tuesday at 102 years old.

Saint grew up in Albany and Delmar, New York. She was a delicate, porcelain beauty. She attended the Actors Studio in New York, performed on Broadway and did live television in the late 1940s. But Saint didn’t do a film until she was almost 30, after director Elia Kazan suggested she screen test with a guy named Marlon Brando. They did a scene from On the Waterfront in which Saint is supposed to keep Brando out of her house.

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Saint plays femme fatale Eve Kendall in 1959’s North by Northwest.

Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

In 2000, Saint told WHYY’s Fresh Air, “I don’t know what happened, but … [Brando] came in the living room. We were dancing, we were laughing, I was crying. He was taking my skirt and … whipping it around, and the sparks flew. And Kazan saw that. And suddenly I was in On the Waterfront.”

In that film, Saint plays Edie, a Catholic schoolgirl who finds herself in the middle of union corruption in Hoboken, N.J. When her longshoreman brother is murdered, Edie wants justice. Saint won an Oscar for performance.

Five years after playing the chaste heroine Edie, Saint played a femme fatale opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. But Saint was no femme fatale off the screen. After marrying director Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, she limited her roles to devote more time to her children. She went back to TV in the ’70s, and won an Emmy in 1990 for the miniseries People Like Us.

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