Background and career
Eva Marie Saint (July 4, 1924 – October 6, 2026) was an American actress. In a career spanning seven decades, she received an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award, as well as nominations for two BAFTAs and a Golden Globe. At the time of her death, Saint was one of the earliest and oldest living Academy Award winners and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Saint graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1946 and began her career as a television and radio actress in the late 1940s. She played the role of Thelma in Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful (1953) for which she earned Theatre World Award. She made her film debut in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), opposite Marlon Brando. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress along with a BAFTA nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. Saint continued her film career with roles in Raintree County and A Hatful of Rain (both 1957); for the latter she was nominated for a Golden Globe and a second BAFTA Award. She then starred as Eve Kendall in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) a landmark thriller that became one of the defining films of both Hitchcock's career and the suspense genre. In the 1960s, Saint appeared in Exodus (1960), 36 Hours (1964), The Sandpiper (1965), The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, and Grand Prix (both 1966). From the 1970s onward, she worked primarily on television and stage, later winning a Primetime Emmy Award for the television miniseries People Like Us (1990). Her last theatrical film appearance was in Winter's Tale (2014). For her contributions to motion pictures and television, Saint received two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Eva Marie Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, to John Merle Saint and Eva Marie (née Rice) Saint. Her parents were Quakers. She attended Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar, New York, graduating in 1942. Saint studied acting at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where she joined the Delta Gamma sorority. During this time, Saint played the lead role in a production of Personal Appearance. She was an active member of the theater honorary fraternity, Theta Alpha Phi, and served as record keeper of the student council in 1944. Saint graduated from Bowling Green in 1946. A theater on its campus is named after her.
Saint's introduction to television began as an NBC page. She appeared in the live NBC-TV show Campus Hoopla from 1946 to 1947. She also appeared in Bonnie Maid's Versa-Tile Varieties on NBC in 1949 as one of the original singing "Bonnie Maids" used in the live commercials. Saint appeared in LIFE twice prior to becoming a star. She was featured in a photograph which began a December 1, 1947, special essay about television, then a September 19, 1949, feature article about her as a struggling actress earning minimum amounts from early TV while trying to make ends meet in New York City. In 1954, Saint won the Outer Critics Circle Special Award for her Broadway stage role in the Horton Foote play The Trip to Bountiful (1953), in which she co-starred with Lillian Gish and Jo Van Fleet. In 1955, Saint was nominated for her first Emmy for "Best Actress In A Single Performance" on The Philco Television Playhouse, playing the young mistress of middle-aged E. G. Marshall in Middle of the Night by Paddy Chayefsky. She won another Emmy nomination for the 1955 television musical version of Our Town, adapted from the Thornton Wilder play of the same name. Her success and acclaim in television productions were of such a high level that "one slightly hyperbolic primordial TV critic dubbed her 'the Helen Hayes of television.'"
In 1954, Saint made her feature film debut in On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando and directed by Elia Kazan—for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the role of Edie Doyle (whose brother's death sets the film's drama in motion), with her competitors having been Claire Trevor, Nina Foch, Katy Jurado and Jan Sterling. She also earned a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award nomination for "Most Promising Newcomer". In his review for The New York Times, film critic A. H. Weiler wrote, "In casting Eva Marie Saint—a newcomer to movies from TV and Broadway—Mr. Kazan has come up with a pretty and blond 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." The film was a major success and launched Saint's film career. She received $7,500 for the role. Saint recalled making the film, which has been highly influential, saying, "[Elia] Kazan put me in a room with Marlon Brando. He said 'Brando is the boyfriend of your sister. You're not used to being with a young man. Don't let him in the door under any circumstances.' I don't know what he told Marlon; you'll have to ask him—good luck! [Brando] came in and started teasing me. He put me off balance. And I remained off balance for the whole shoot." Her appearance in On The Waterfront is referenced in the lyrics of the 1984 song "Rattlesnakes" by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. In 1956, Saint appeared alongside Bob Hope in That Certain Feeling for which she received $50,000. She was then offered $100,000 to star in the Civil War drama Raintree County (1957) with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. After that, she starred with Don Murray in A Hatful of Rain, the pioneering drug-addiction drama, which although made later than Raintree County was released earlier in 1957. She received a nomination for the "Best Foreign Actress" award from the British Academy of Film and Television for her performance.
In 1959, director Alfred Hitchcock surprised many by choosing Saint over dozens of other candidates for the femme fatale role in what was to become the suspense classic North by Northwest with Cary Grant and James Mason. North by Northwest became a box-office hit and an influence on spy films for decades. The film ranks number forty on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time. Hitchcock worked with Saint to make her voice lower and huskier, and personally chose costumes for her during a shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman in New York City. In his review of the film on August 7, 1959, The New York Times critic Abe H. Weiler wrote, "In casting Eva Marie Saint as [Cary Grant's] romantic vis-a-vis, Mr. Hitchcock has plumbed some talents not shown by the actress heretofore. Although she is seemingly a hard, designing type, she also emerges both the sweet heroine and a glamorous charmer." In 2000, recalling her experience making the picture with Cary Grant and Hitchcock, Saint said, "[Grant] would say, 'See, Eva Marie, you don't have to cry in a movie to have a good time. Just kick up your heels and have fun.' Hitchcock said, 'I don't want you to do a sink-to-sink movie again, ever. You've done these black-and-white movies like On the Waterfront. It's drab in that tenement house. Women go to the movies, and they've just left the sink at home. They don't want to see you at the sink.'" In a 2010 interview she stated: "I said, 'I can't promise you that, Hitch, because I love those dramas.'"
Although North by Northwest might have propelled her to the top ranks of stardom, Saint chose to limit her film work in order to spend time with her husband since 1951, director Jeffrey Hayden, and their two children. In the 1960s, she co-starred with Paul Newman in Exodus (1960), a fictional historical drama about the founding of the state of Israel suggested by the novel of the same name by Leon Uris. It was directed by Otto Preminger. She also co-starred with Warren Beatty, Karl Malden and Angela Lansbury as a tragic beauty in the drama All Fall Down (1962). In 1965, Saint appeared with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the melodrama The Sandpiper for Vincente Minnelli, and with James Garner in the World War II thriller 36 Hours, directed by George Seaton. Saint joined an all-star cast in the comedic satire The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, directed by Norman Jewison, and the international racing drama Grand Prix (1966), directed by Frankenheimer and presented in Cinerama. In 1970, Saint starred in Loving, alongside George Segal. The film was about a commercial artist's relationship with his wife and other women; it was critically acclaimed but did not have wide viewership. In the 1970s and 1980s, with her return to television, Saint saw a resurgence in her career. She received an Emmy nomination for the 1977 miniseries How The West Was Won and a 1978 Emmy nomination for Taxi!!!. She was reunited with On the Waterfront co-star Karl Malden in the television film Fatal Vision, this time as the wife of his character, as he investigated the murder of his daughter and granddaughters. She played the mother of Cybill Shepherd in the television series Moonlighting, a role that spanned episodes over three years.
