Eva Marie Saint has died age 102: the last star of Hollywood’s Golden Age

Eva Marie Saint, who has died aged 102, was showered in awards across her long career. Her performances spanned from her first stage appearances in 1942 to her final film appearance in 2019.

But while she was the last star of Hollywood’s Golden Age, it was television’s Golden Age where she began her long career. It was television and then even newer formats like podcasting that sustained it.

Saint was celebrated as a film star, including her landmark performances for Hollywood’s best directors including Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and John Frankenheimer. And while her film acting led to awards and nominations from the BAFTAs to the Oscars, films are only one part of a diverse career.

She received an Oscar in 1955 for On the Waterfront and an Emmy in 1990 for the miniseries People Like Us. There was a Drama Critics Award in 1953 for The Trip to Bountiful on Broadway. In 2012, she received a Behind the Voice Actors Voice Acting Award for her voice work on the animated series The Legend of Korra (2012–14).

Her many awards, and even more nominations, reveal her astonishing capacity to reinvent herself not just in the roles she played but the media she appeared on. Saint showed rare versatility by changing image and style and medium and format across eight decades.

The golden age of television

Born in 1924, before the development of television and even the talkies, Saint made her television debut in 1947 in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Saint was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time for the first Golden Age of American television.

This Golden Age gave Saint and other actors not just employment but a national audience for serious drama.

Commercial sponsorship also meant actors like Saint were infamously obliged to advertise products as well as act.

Saint had an ongoing role in the successful TV drama Martin Kane Private Eye (1949–54). But sponsorship from the United States Tobacco Company meant the cast had to, not too subtly, advertise pipes and cigarettes by talking about smoking in each episode!

Television kept her fully occupied until her big screen debut in 1954’s On the Waterfront.

A move to the big screen

Today, her fame rests on two entirely different films: the intense black and white drama about dockside corruption in On the Waterfront (1954), and the colour and lighthearted adventure in North by Northwest (1959).

From director Elia Kazan, On the Waterfront was Saint’s breakout film role in a heavy hitting movie about corruption among men who worked on the docks. Starring Marlon Brando as well as Saint, the film received eight Oscars, including Best Supporting Actress for Saint.

At least one person wasn’t a fan – Alfred Hitchcock wanted to use Saint in a more glamorous role and setting.

“It’s drab in that tenement house. Women go to the movies, and they’ve just left the sink at home. They don’t want to see you at the sink” Hitchcock told her.

Normally, one break out role would be enough for any actor. But Saint had two. Showing the cycles of invention and reinvention that propelled her career, Saint moved from black and white intensity to colour adventure.

The “Hitchcock Blonde” is a fixture of his films. Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedron and Kim Novak are among them, and in North by Northwest Hitchcock added Saint to their ranks.

Playing a femme fatale (or is she?) pitched against good guy Cary Grant, Saint stepped far away from the drab On the Waterfront in an adventure sweeping across the United States to the final exciting chase across Mount Rushmore.

North by Northwest remade Saint’s image as a glamourous blonde but her film career afterwards lacked consistency. Exodus (1960) was a hit; All Fall Down (1962) lost money at the box office.

Back to television – and to podcasts

Saint began on television, and it was television which sustained her career.

After her big screen career declined in the 1970s, Saint returned to television with award-winning success. She received Emmy nominations for How the West Was Won (1976–79) and Taxi!!! (1978), and appeared on TV in works diverse as Frasier (1992–2004) and Moonlighting (1985–89).

Other changes involved a shift to the superhero film in 2006’s Superman Returns and Nickelodeon’s children’s animation in The Legend of Korra (2012–14). Finally, she was podcasting in scripted comedy The Pack Podcast, aged 98.

Other golden age legends like Olivia de Havilland lived long lives, but few remained so active across so many media as Eva Marie Saint. Fewer still showed the same ability to change in ways that found new audiences and new media over a career of 80 years.