Eva Marie Saint — award-winning actor and Montecito resident — died of natural causes on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. Born on the Fourth of July in 1924, Saint was 102.
The Oscar-winning actor was famed for her roles in films that became classics — Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Otto Preminger’s Exodus — though as time passed, Leonard Maltin wrote that she found “few vehicles worthy of her talent,” in his Movie Encyclopedia.
Married to Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, Saint would tell interviewers that her agent warned her that if she kept turning roles down, she’d never be a superstar. “I don’t want to be a superstar,” she would say. “I was having children.” Among her grandchildren is the Independent’s Tyler Hayden, who wrote about her career in 2009, saying, “She’s my grandma.”
In the piece, Saint relates her history of choosing acting over teaching, with her parents’ blessing — “they didn’t go off screaming” — then making the rounds of N.Y.C. agencies, working in radio at first, variety shows in the new medium of television (“My first role was applauding off camera”), modeling, and how she learned about acting: “I tell young actors that they must study. … They’re not ready for it if they don’t work at it.”
She was nine months pregnant with her first child when she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in On the Waterfront, opposite Marlon Brando’s Best Actor win. The film, considered one of the most evocative ever made in the U.S., swept the Academy Awards that year — director, screenplay, cinematography, editing, art direction, and Best Picture.
The accolades being written about Eva Marie Saint speak not only to her timelessness but her ability to give “stunning” performances, in Pauline Kael’s words. It’s a filmography that is panoramic in its range: Superman Returns, The Stalking Moon, the television play The Trip to Bountiful, That Certain Feeling (with Bob Hope), Grand Prix (with Yves Montand), Because of Winn-Dixie, and many more that are bound to be broadcast soon.
