Eva Saint Marie, who won Oscar for ‘On the Waterfront,’ dies at 102

Actress Eva Marie Saint, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in “On the Waterfront” and also had memorable roles in movies such as “North by Northwest,” died on Tuesday. She was 102.

She died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The graceful actress was adept at playing love interests alongside some of Hollywood’s leading men. She earned an Oscar for her role as Edie Doyle in 1954’s “On the Waterfront.” At the time of her death, Saint was the oldest living Oscar winner, according to Variety.

Saint was nine months pregnant with her first child when she picked up her Oscar, The New York Times reported. She told the audience at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood that “I’m so excited I may have the baby right here.” Her son was born two days later, according to the newspaper.

Cary Grant dangled Saint from Mount Rushmore in the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock thriller, “North by Northwest,” and she played opposite Paul Newman in “Exodus” (1960), Yves Montand in “Grand Prix” (1966) and Gregory Peck in “The Stalking Moon” (1968), according to the newspaper.

Hitchcock gave little direction to her, Saint said in a 2000 interview on National Public Radio, Variety reported.

“(He said, ‘Lower your voice, don’t use your hands ... and look directly into Cary Grant’s eyes all the time,’ which was not difficult,” she said.

Now a hot commodity, Saint decided to raise a family, making only one movie a year while her two children were growing up, The New York Times reported. She said she rejected a three-picture deal her agent promised would make her “a superstar,” but Saint declined, saying that she wanted “to be a working actress with a home life that worked.”

“I was having children, I was turning things down and my agent said, ‘Eva Marie, you’ll never be a superstar’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to be a superstar,’” she often said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Saint played a scorned wife in the 1965 film “The Sandpiper” and appeared the following year in the comedy, “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming,” Variety reported.

When the movie roles became scarce, Saint switched to television beginning in the 1970s, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“As I got older, there weren’t that many roles,” she said during a 1990 interview with the newspaper. “I segued into TV and am perfectly happy.”

She had a recurring role as Cybill Shepherd’s mother on the 1980s television series “Moonlighting” and received an Emmy Award for her role in the 1990 miniseries, “People Like Us.”

Saint returned to the big screen again during the 2000s, appearing in “I Dreamed of Africa” (2000), “Because of Winn-Dixie” and “Don’t Come Knocking” (2005), Variety reported. In 2006’s “Superman Returns,” she played Martha Kent, the adoptive mother of the Man of Steel.

Her final movie credit came in the 2014 film, “Winter’s Tale,” according to the entertainment news website.

Asked during a 2011 interview with Vanity Fair if she ever watched her own films, Saint said, “Sometimes I do. And I think, ‘Well, gee. You did that? Good job!’”

Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Albany, New York, according to the Los Angeles Times.

She attended Bowling Green University in Ohio, where she switched from training to become a teacher to majoring in drama, the newspaper reported.

She graduated in 1946 with a bachelor’s degree in speech, and the university named a theater after her in 2012, The New York Times reported.

Her early roles included playing a cheerleader in a Keds sneaker commercial, according to the newspaper.

By 1948, she was taking classes at the Actors Studio in New York and met Jeffrey Hayden, who went on to have a lengthy career as a television director, the Los Angeles Times reported. They married in 1951.

“Family always came first,” Saint told Moving Pictures Magazine in 2006. When she was working out the deal to appear in “Exodus,” she told director Otto Preminger that she would not leave her two young children behind.

“I said to Otto, ‘I’ll have to bring my folks from Pennsylvania, and Jeff is coming and his mother,’ and Otto said, ‘Well, it looks like you’ll have your own Exodus going.’”

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