Eva Marie Saint, Who Won an Oscar for Her First Movie, Dies at 102

The 'On the Waterfront' star also played opposite Cary Grant in Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest' and kept acting into her 90s.

Eva Marie Saint was pregnant with her first child when Frank Sinatra handed her an Oscar for the first movie she ever made. From the stage, the Associated Press recounted, she smiled and said, "I think I may have the baby right here." Her son, Darrell, was born two days later.

Saint also played the spy who falls for Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest." She died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, family representative Jeff Sanderson confirmed, according to the AP obituary published by LAist. She was 102, and she'd kept working well into her 90s.

That first movie was "On the Waterfront," the 1954 classic in which she played the woman Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy falls for. Before that, she'd lost the only female part in the Broadway play "Mister Roberts." She then spent six months understudying the actor who got it, Jocelyn Brando, Marlon's sister, and never went on once.

Elia Kazan, who had auditioned her for the Actors Studio, called her in to improvise a scene with Marlon Brando: her job was to keep a young man from getting into her apartment. "Marlon got in the door and turned on the music," she told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. "Kazan saw the sparks fly, and that's how I got the part."

The Oscar made her a star overnight, and then she stepped back. She refused studio contracts and passed on chances to follow up the win so she could spend time with her new son. She made only seven films in her first decade in Hollywood. She turned down "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" with Gregory Peck and "The Rainmaker" with Burt Lancaster.

Her husband, the TV and stage director Jeffrey Hayden, talked her into the Hitchcock movie. He offered to watch the kids while she found somewhere quiet to read the script again. In a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair, Saint said of him, "He was so right. And that's what husbands are for." They were married for 55 years, until he died in 2016.

Her choosiness didn't scare the studios off. Lead roles kept coming, in "Exodus," "Raintree County" and "All Fall Down" with Warren Beatty. She moved toward television in the 1970s. In the 1980s she found a new audience as Cybill Shepherd's mother on "Moonlighting" and as Tom Hanks' mother in "Nothing in Common."

She won an Emmy for the 1990 miniseries "People Like Us." After 2000 came "Because of Winn-Dixie," "Superman Returns" and "Winter's Tale."

Plenty of people assumed a name that sounded so much like a stage name had come from a studio. It hadn't. She was born Eva Marie Saint on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey. She planned to teach third grade like her mother, until she auditioned for a play at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and won the lead.

She was shy, and she credited acting coach Lee Strasberg with getting her past it. He gave her a scene that made her cry in front of the other actors. When she finally did it, she told the Santa Barbara Independent in 2009, "my peers were crying with me."

Her first break came after a year of job-hunting in Manhattan: two lines on a radio drama, playing a telephone operator. In 2021, in her late 90s, she was a voice in an audio play again, playing Marisa Tomei's aunt in "The Bus Ride," a short piece for "The Pack Podcast."

Source: LAist, retrieved October 7, 2026.