Actress Eva Marie Saint Dies at 102
By Sandra Rhodes (/journals/sandra-rhodes)
Academy Award winner Eva Marie Saint, the actress who won an Academy Award for her work on “On the Waterfront,” has died.
She was 102.
Saint, a Newark, New Jersey, native, was the oldest living Oscar winner. She died Tuesday at her Los Angeles home.
Her 1955 supporting actress Oscar came for her performance opposite Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.”
“Eva Marie Saint makes a perfect foil for Brando, and the two actors have a famous scene in a bar where he reveals, almost indirectly, that he likes her, and she turns the conversation from romance to conscience,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1999. “… the acting and the best dialogue passages have an impact that has not dimmed.”
In 1959, Saint became one of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic leading ladies in the mold of Grace Kelly in the Master of Suspense’s beloved “North by Northwest,” a comedic, cross-country chase thriller in which she held her own against love interest Cary Grant.
“In casting Eva Marie Saint as his romantic vis-à-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,” the New York Times said in a contemporary review.
Her husband, TV director Jeffrey Hayden, preceded her in death in 2016. Survivors include her two children, Darrell Hayden and Laurette Hayden, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.