Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress who starred in the Hollywood classics On the Waterfront and North by Northwest and later played Superman’s adoptive mother, Martha Kent, has died at 102.
Saint died peacefully of natural causes on Tuesday at her Los Angeles home, surrounded by family and loved ones, according to family representative Jeff Sanderson.
Born in New Jersey in 1924 into a Quaker family, Saint began her career as a radio and television performer. Her early struggle to establish herself in the entertainment industry was documented in a 1949 Life magazine feature.
She began attracting wider attention in the early 1950s, appearing in 1953 in both the original television production and Broadway premiere of Horton Foote’s play The Trip to Bountiful.
Saint made her film debut a year later in Elia Kazan’s acclaimed 1954 crime drama On the Waterfront, starring opposite Marlon Brando.
Her portrayal of Edie Doyle, the love interest of Brando’s conflicted boxer-turned-docker, earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, immediately establishing her as one of Hollywood’s leading performers.
She went on to appear in a string of major productions, including That Certain Feeling with Bob Hope, Fred Zinnemann’s A Hatful of Rain, in which she played the wife of a secretly drug-addicted man, and the period western Raintree County, alongside Elizabeth Taylor.
In 1959, Saint landed one of the defining roles of her career when Alfred Hitchcock cast her opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest.
She played Eve Kendall, a mysterious woman caught up in an international espionage plot, in what became one of Hitchcock’s most celebrated films.
Saint continued to work across film and television for decades, winning an Emmy Award in 1990 for her performance as a wealthy widow in the television miniseries People Like Us.
She introduced herself to a younger generation in 2006 when she portrayed Martha Kent, Superman’s adoptive mother, in Superman Returns.
Saint, who received two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, once reflected on how her long life and experiences had deepened her acting.
“The longer you live, the smarter you get, because you’ve been around, you’ve seen things,” she told Turner Classic Movies.
“You’ve gone through different emotional experiences in your own life, and hopefully, you understand things better.
“And that makes you a better actress.”
Saint was married to actor Jeffrey Hayden for 65 years until his death in 2016. She is survived by their two children.
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