Eva Marie Saint was considered a silver screen legend, even though her 60 years in Hollywood encompassed just 22 theatrical features. Still, even if she had retired at 35 after her first five movies, she still would have had a legendary career, having won an Oscar for her screen debut and having starred in two of the greatest films of all time: On the Waterfront and North by Northwest.
As it turned out, however, Saint continued to dazzle with her intelligence, vulnerability, and beauty in movies and television for the rest of her long life, which ended Tuesday when she died of natural causes, according to a press release.
Born in Newark, N.J., Saint studied acting at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University (where there is now a theater named after her). After returning to New York and studying at the Actors Studio, she launched her TV career at the dawn of the medium, in 1947, graduating from NBC page to bit-part actress to dramatic lead. “My first role was applauding off camera, and I remember calling my parents and saying, ‘You won’t see me, but you’ll hear me,’” Saint said in 2012. “Then the next week, I was on camera. . . applauding. I really started from scratch and got to see actors onstage, then I got small roles and gradually got to be the leading lady.”
At the same time, she was making a name for herself on Broadway, starring opposite silent-film legend Lillian Gish in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful in 1953. In an era when stage play adaptations were a TV staple, Saint excelled in so many of them (including a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town co-starring Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra) that she earned the nickname “the Helen Hayes of television.” She was nominated for two Emmys in 1955, though she wouldn’t win the top TV prize until 1990, for the TV miniseries People Like Us.
Saint was 30 when she made her film debut opposite Marlon Brando in 1954’s On the Waterfront. As the blue-collar girl Edie Doyle, who begins a tender, tentative romance with Brando’s tormented dockworker Terry Malloy, Saint became an instant movie star and won the Oscar for best supporting actress. For the next few years, she continued to star in high-profile films, including pioneering drug-abuse drama A Hatful of Rain, Southern epic Raintree County, and most famously, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest.