EVA MARIE SAINT
(4 July 1924 – 6 October 2026)
The career of the American actress Eva Marie Saint spanned some eighty years beginning in television in 1946, then on stage from 1953 and in films from 1954, the year she made On the Waterfront opposite Marlon Brando. The latter was her first film and it was the start of a very successful career in cinema working with directors like Edward Dmytryk, Fred Zinnemann, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, John Frankenheimer, Vincente Minnelli and Robert Mulligan.
Eva Marie Saint was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a Quaker family, attended Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar, New York, and studied acting at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where the theatre there was named after her. Starting in television, she was in a live NBC show called Campus Hoopla and by 1954 she was on stage in New York and won an Outer Critics Circle Award for Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful. Then on TV she was nominated for her first Emmy for Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night, and also for a TV musical version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, opposite a young Paul Newman.
By then she was firmly entrenched in the cinema. Having made an enormous impact in On the Waterfront opposite Brando, playing the sister of Brando’s girlfriend, Saint could do no wrong. Directed by Elia Kazan from a screenplay by Budd Schulberg, the movie concerned corruption among the longshoremen in the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey. It received twelve Academy Award nominations and won eight including best picture and best director, while Marlon Brando won for best actor and Eva Marie Saint for best supporting actress. She next appeared in That Certain Feeling, a comedy with Bob Hope, and her career took a lift with Dmytryk’s Raintree County, a Civil War drama with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, although the film itself was not well received. Then Saint was Golden Globe-nominated for A Hatful of Rain, Fred Zinnemann’s drama about drug addiction in a sober production that was more worthy than entertaining. She then played a double-edged spy in North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s superlative thriller with Cary Grant’s hero being mistaken for somebody who didn’t even exist. It was everybody’s best film – Grant’s, Saint’s, James Mason’s villain and Leo G. Carroll’s mastermind – all terrific and with Hitch too at the top of his game. And Saint had never looked lovelier.
She should have worked with Paul Newman in Martin Ritt’s The Long, Hot Summer but was pregnant at the time and was replaced by Joanne Woodward. She did, however, work with Newman on Preminger’s Exodus, about the beginnings of the state of Israel. In Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down she seduced Warren Beatty who himself played a serial seducer. She then made the thriller 36 Hours with James Garner, The Sandpiper, Minnelli’s overblown romance with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, playing a fashion editor and lover of Yves Montand. In Robert Mulligan’s The Stalking Moon she was a white woman captured by Native Americans, for whom she produces a mixed-race baby. When the cinema failed to offer suitable parts, she returned to television for some series and TV movies including How the West Was Won, Splendor in the Grass, and Titanic. She did, however, appear in further films, including Hugh Hudson’s I Dreamed of Africa with Kim Basinger in 2000, and Superman Returns in 2006 as Martha Kent, Brandon Routh’s adoptive mother. Her last appearance was in Mariette in Ecstasy (2019), with Rutger Hauer, as a Mother Superior in a religious community.
Eva Marie Saint was a superb actress who never gave a bad performance. She was made for the movies and lit up the screen in whatever she played. She had a long and productive life and was irreplaceable as a performer and a human being. She died at her home in Los Angeles at the age of 102.She was married to the writer-director-producer Jeffrey Hayden from 1951 until his death in 2016. They had two children, Darrell and Laurette.
MICHAEL DARVELL
