Eva Marie Saint, the acclaimed actress who starred in Elia Kazan’s 1954 classic On the Waterfront and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest, has died at the age of 102. Raised in Albany and Delmar, New York, Saint built a foundation in theater and live television during the late 1940s after studying at the Actors Studio in New York. Despite her early work on stage and screen, she did not land her first major film role until she was nearly 30, following a screen test alongside Marlon Brando arranged by director Elia Kazan. Reflecting on the audition in a 2000 interview with WHYY’s Fresh Air, Saint recalled how Brando came into the living room and they danced, laughed, and cried together, sparking an undeniable chemistry that immediately secured her the part. In On the Waterfront, Saint portrayed Edie, a Catholic schoolgirl caught up in Hoboken, New Jersey union corruption who seeks justice after her longshoreman brother is murdered. Her powerful performance earned her an Academy Award. Five years later, she took on a very different persona as femme fatale Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Unlike her onscreen characters, Saint maintained a grounded personal life offscreen. Following her marriage to director Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, she deliberately scaled back her film roles to focus on raising her children. She eventually returned to television work during the 1970s and later secured an Emmy Award in 1990 for her performance in the miniseries People Like Us.
Source: npr.org
