In 2018, when at 93 she appeared in peak form at the Oscar ceremony to present one of the awards, Eva Marie Saint joked: “I just realized one thing: I’m older than the Academy by four or five months. I’m very proud of that.” The actress of North by Northwest and On the Waterfront has died in Los Angeles at 102, after having acted in her last film in 2019! Her career was very rich and long, even though we naturally tend to remember only a few classics.
Eva Marie Saint, a career spanning more than seventy years
Eva Marie Saint was born in New Jersey in 1924 and began acting while still in college, later moving into a professional career in the then-nascent television industry, though she truly drew notice with her Broadway performance in “The Trip to Bountiful” in 1954. In the same year she landed the role of Edie Doyle in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, while also securing an Emmy for an episode of The Philco Television Playhouse. By that point her career had taken off, and among the various feature films in the immediate years that followed, North by Northwest (1959) by Alfred Hitchcock stands out, where her ambiguous Eve Kendall turns Cary Grant’s head.
Although she did not stay inactive, in the following decades she carefully paced her commitments to be with her husband (the director Jeffrey Hayden, married in 1951, who had their first child in 1954, and who she was widowed from in 2010): among her works are A Hatful of Rain (1958, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations), Exodus (1960, with Paul Newman), Sand Castles (1965, with Burton and Taylor) and Cancel My Reservation (1972, alongside comedian Bob Hope), the last film before a long hiatus from cinema, after which she earned Emmy nominations for How the West Was Won in ’76 and won for People Like Us in 1990.
She returned to the screen in 1986 as Tom Hanks’s mother in Nothing in Common, continuing to focus more on television roles, until she even encountered a superhero film, portraying Martha Kent in Superman Returns (2006) opposite Brandon Routh. Between 2012 and 2014 she even did voice work for animation, voicing Katara in The Legend of Korra. Her last appearance was in Mariette in Ecstasy (2019), although through 2022, tireless, she took part in a number of radio dramas via podcasts.
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