Eva Marie Saint, Oscar-Winning Star of On the Waterfront, Dead at 102

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At 34, EvaMarie Saint was originally dismissed as both too old and too innocent-looking to play 55-year-old Cary Grant's love interest in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

Fatefully, the director didn't agree.

"Hitchcock wanted the 'cool blonde,'" Saint reminisced to Remind magazine in 2000. "I remember saying to my husband, 'Hitchcock sees me as a sexy spy lady!' And my husband said, 'So do I!'"

And movie magic was made once again with Saint going toe-to-toe with one of Hollywood's most captivating leading men.

One of the last surviving stars of Hollywood's golden age, Saint died Oct. 6 of natural causes at her Los Angeles home, according to multiple outlets. She was 102. A family representative, Jeff Sanderson, confirmed her passing.

Before Saint played Eve Kendall, the romantic foil to Grant's Roger Thornhill, a New York adman unwittingly caught up in a web of international intrigue, she had enjoyed a whirlwind rise after getting a relatively late start in films.

Born July 4, 1924, to a Quaker family in Newark, N.J., Saint planned to become a teacher like her mother, but ended up graduating from Ohio's Bowling Green State University with a degree in theater in 1946. She moved to New York City and, while serving as a page at NBC, she parlayed the proximity to television into her first screen appearance as a commercial spokeswoman on the network's Campus Hoopla. For the next seven years, Saint modeled and took classes at the famed Actors' Studio while racking up credits in live teleplays.

At the behest of Saint's agent, director Elia Kazan tuned in to see her play Thelma in a 1953 adaptation of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful and, the actress recalled on NPR's Fresh Air in 2000, "thought of me as the young virginal blonde in On the Waterfront."

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Instead of having her read for the film about a demoralized ex-boxer who takes a stand against a mobster union boss, Kazan instructed Saint to improvise being a young woman who was going to get a visit from a man looking for her sister, who was not home—and her task was to keep the man out of her house at all costs.

But it was impossible to keep Marlon Brando out of the house "and the sparks flew," Saint recalled. "And suddenly I was in On the Waterfront."

Saint's big-screen debut at 29 couldn't have been any more promising. The 1954 film was named Best Picture at the 27th Academy Awards the following year, while Kazan won Best Director, Brando won Best Actor and Saint won Best Supporting Actress for her tender turn as Edie, the love interest of Brando's Terry Malloy.

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"I may have the baby right here," the beaming star, nine months pregnant at the time, said upon accepting her statue at a simultaneous ceremony in New York that was spliced into the Los Angeles broadcast. She thanked a few people, including "all the longshoremen," and promptly left the stage.

Brief as she was, Saint told the Los Angeles Times in 2010, most winners said nothing but thank you back then, and "I said a little more than most people."

She gave birth to son Darrell Hayden, her first child with husband Jeffrey Hayden, two days after the ceremony. The Oscar winner thought her family would continue to live in New York, where On the Waterfront was shot, but Hollywood beckoned.

"I had done all that live television, did the movie, and Jeffrey and I did a 'Person to Person' with Edward Murrow," Saint said. "It’s so funny, because I’m saying, 'I don’t want to go to Hollywood. Theater is what we’ll do.' How your life changes."

Speaking of which, she had met Hayden in February 1949, when he spotted her getting off the subway at Rockefeller Center and immediately asked her out for coffee.

Saint told him she didn't drink coffee, but accepted a lunch invitation and, on June 29 of that year, wrote in her datebook, "Jeff's here to stay."

And, she told the LA Times in 2018, "Boy, did he."

They married in 1951 and it was her husband's lips she was thinking of when she kissed Brando in the role that made her a serious contender.

"That one love scene, I had a little trouble with that because I felt embarrassed because I was in a slip," she told the Times in 2010. "I’d done a lot of live television but never a movie. And Kazan was such a wonderful director. He just came over and whispered in my ear. He didn’t say 'Rosebud.' He said, 'Jeff.' That’s all he had to say, and I was into it."

Daughter Laurette Hayden was born in 1958 and, the following year, Saint took on her other most iconic role, playing Eve in North by Northwest, joining the pantheon of iconic glacier-cool Hitchcock blondes.

When it came to being directed by Hitchcock, "He worked with me from the outside in,” Saint told Vanity Fair in 2014. "My hair, my makeup, my shoes, my jewelry, my purse, my gloves, everything. And just from creating that exterior for me, he gave me the sense of a spy lady. But we never talked about emotion. He told me not to use my hands, I have a habit of doing that, and to lower my voice. And always, in my scenes with Cary Grant, look directly into his eyes, which was not difficult."

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Saint was a big-screen star throughout the 1960s in the likes of Otto Preminger's Exodus, John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down and Grand Prix, Vincente Minelli's The Sandpiper and Norman Jewison's The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, but she was more in demand than her list of credits indicates.

On CBS Sunday Mornings in 2014, she recalled telling an agent that she only wanted to do one movie a year, if that, because she had young children at home, "and he said, 'Well, I guess you won't be a superstar.' And I said, 'Well, I guess not!'"

That agent was promptly fired. After 1972's Cancel My Reservation, Saint did mostly television and theater work for the next three decades but her later movies included 2000's I Dreamed of Africa, 2005's Because of Winn-Dixie, 2006's Superman Returns (playing Martha Kent, Clark Kent's mom on Earth) and 2014 Winter's Tale, which turned out to be her final film.

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Saint and Hayden, a director and producer, remained together until his death at 90 on Dec. 24, 2016.

They costarred in benefit performances of the two-character play Love Letters to raise money for epilepsy research in honor of one of their grandchildren who has the condition, but they otherwise didn't collaborate professionally.

"We worked it out so only one would of us would be on location at a time," Saint shared in a 2018 interview at Bowling Green after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from her alma mater, "and I don't think we ever worked at the same time."

And while she credited her wonderful college experience with guiding her toward acting, Saint also acknowledged the support she was lucky to have throughout her life, starting with her father, who endorsed her wish to change her degree from education to theater.

“I guess I felt grounded as a child and no wrong could come, and you keep working hard and be sincere and honest and try to do what you want to do,” Saint said. “Maybe it’s a fool’s paradise, but it’s worked for me so far. I think you have to have your priorities in life. I married the right man. I have two beautiful children and four grandchildren while being an actor."