As it turned out, however, Saint continued to dazzle with her intelligence, vulnerability, and beauty in movies and television for the rest of her long life, which ended Tuesday when she died of natural causes, according to a press release.

Born in Newark, N.J., Saint studied acting at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University (where there is now a theater named after her). After returning to New York and studying at the Actors Studio, she launched her TV career at the dawn of the medium, in 1947, graduating from NBC page to bit-part actress to dramatic lead. “My first role was applauding off camera, and I remember calling my parents and saying, ‘You won’t see me, but you’ll hear me,’” Saint said in 2012. “Then the next week, I was on camera. . . applauding. I really started from scratch and got to see actors onstage, then I got small roles and gradually got to be the leading lady.”

At the same time, she was making a name for herself on Broadway, starring opposite silent-film legend Lillian Gish in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful in 1953. In an era when stage play adaptations were a TV staple, Saint excelled in so many of them (including a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town co-starring Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra) that she earned the nickname “the Helen Hayes of television.” She was nominated for two Emmys in 1955, though she wouldn’t win the top TV prize until 1990, for the TV miniseries People Like Us.

Saint was 30 when she made her film debut opposite Marlon Brando in 1954’s On the Waterfront. As the blue-collar girl Edie Doyle, who begins a tender, tentative romance with Brando’s tormented dockworker Terry Malloy, Saint became an instant movie star and won the Oscar for best supporting actress. For the next few years, she continued to star in high-profile films, including pioneering drug-abuse drama A Hatful of Rain, Southern epic Raintree County, and most famously, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest.

Dismissive of what he called the “kitchen-sink” roles she’d played until then, Hitchcock believed he could turn Saint into one of his sleek and sexy blonde heroines—in this case, Eve Kendall, the seductive spy who ensnares ad man Cary Grant. To transform her, Hitchcock took the actress shopping at Bergdorf Goodman in New York and picked out her clothes, and he had her cut short the waist-length tresses that had been a trademark of hers until that time. “He just somehow knew I’d be right as the sexy spy lady,” Saint said in 2012. “And because he knew it, I thought, ‘Sure. Why not, if he thinks so?’”

In addition to Brando and Grant, Saint starred opposite several generations of classic movie leading men, including Bob Hope, Montgomery Clift, Warren Beatty, Yves Montand, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck, George Segal, Jackie Gleason, Tom Hanks, and Sam Shepard. Still, in later years, fans were more likely to see her in TV guest spots (most memorably, as Cybill Shepherd’s mom on Moonlighting and as Roz’s mom on Frasier) than on the big screen. (Or hear her; in 2012, she had a recurring voice role on the anime series The Legend of Korra.)

One reason she didn’t feel the need to work often was that she had one of the most stable family lives in Hollywood. In 1951, she married TV director Jeffrey Hayden, and they remained married for more than 60 years, until his death in 2016. They had two children, who survive her as well.

Saint never retired, but her late-career film appearances were so rare that it seemed like an event whenever she’d re-emerge for a feature like 2006’s Superman Returns (where she played Martha Kent, the Man of Steel’s adoptive mother) or 2014’s Winter’s Tale.

“I would love to do something interesting,” the then-88-year-old said in 2012, “but I look at what I’ve done, and it’s hard to take less.”

Home

Eva Marie Saint, Oscar-Winning Star of ‘On the Waterfront,’ Dies at 102