Eva Marie Saint, the graceful actress who delivered two of the most notable film performances of the 1950s, has died at the age of 102. Saint died at her home in Los Angeles on Tuesday, family representative Jeff Sanderson confirmed. Her spokesperson said she died of natural causes.
Saint won an Academy Award for her first film, Elia Kazan's gritty 1954 drama On the Waterfront, in which she played Edie Doyle, the love interest of Brando's tormented Terry Malloy. Her first trip to the Oscars was memorable in its own right: pregnant with her first child, she accepted the statuette from Frank Sinatra and joked, "I think I may have the baby right here." Her son, Darrell, was born two days later. A daughter, Laurette, was born in 1958.
Rather than capitalise immediately on her sudden stardom, Saint took time off and refused studio contracts. In her first decade in Hollywood she appeared in only seven films, declining such productions as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Summer and Smoke and The Rainmaker. She credited her husband, television and stage director Jeffrey Hayden, with persuading her to star in North by Northwest, the 1959 thriller in which her character, a spy, seduces Grant before falling for him. "He was so right. And that's what husbands are for," she told Vanity Fair in 2014.
The New Jersey native, who trained at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in New York, continued to attract leading roles. She worked with Otto Preminger on Exodus (1960) opposite Paul Newman, with John Frankenheimer on All Fall Down (1962) opposite Warren Beatty and on Grand Prix (1966), and with Vincente Minnelli on The Sandpiper (1965) alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Her acting work lasted well into her 90s.