Eva Marie Saint, the Academy Award-winning actor who made her film debut opposite Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront” and later played a cool, calculating spy for director Alfred Hitchcock, died Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102.
Saint died of natural causes, surrounded by family and loved ones, family representative Jeff Sanderson said. Until her death, she was the oldest surviving Oscar winner and one of the last remaining stars of Hollywood’s golden age.
An Oscar for Her First Film
Few careers have opened so emphatically. Saint won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her movie debut as Edie Doyle in director Elia Kazan’s 1954 crime drama “On the Waterfront,” the moral center of the picture and the love interest of Brando’s conflicted boxer-turned-docker.
She collected the trophy while nine months pregnant. “I may have the baby right here!” Saint quipped from the stage. Her son was born two days later.
Her co-star was a committed method actor, and Saint, in an interview with Turner Classic Movies, recalled finding Brando both endearing and slightly unnerving. She had trained in New York at the Herbert Berghof Studio and then at the Actors Studio, the home of method acting, which Kazan co-founded.
Hitchcock’s Blonde and a Selective Career
Five years later, Saint played the femme fatale Eve Kendall in Hitchcock’s 1959 spy thriller “North by Northwest,” seducing — and then falling for — the advertising executive played by Cary Grant. She credited her husband with talking her into the role. Critics have argued that the character set the template for the sophisticated, sexually confident, intelligent blonde archetype that many “Bond women” later followed in the 007 films.
Stardom did not translate into volume. In her first decade in Hollywood, Saint appeared in only seven films, turning down “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” with Gregory Peck, “Summer and Smoke” with Laurence Harvey and “The Rainmaker” with Burt Lancaster. Her agent, she said, warned that she would never reach the top tier of stardom if she kept saying no.
“I want to continue working, but my family always comes first,” she told the Santa Barbara Independent in 2010.
The work she did accept spanned genres and decades: “That Certain Feeling” with Bob Hope, Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” in 1960 with Paul Newman, and John Frankenheimer’s “All Fall Down” with Warren Beatty. On television, she played the mother of Cybill Shepherd’s character on the 1980s sitcom “Moonlighting,” and she won an Emmy Award in 1990 for her role as the wealthy widow Lil Van Degan Altemus in the miniseries “People Like Us.” She had been nominated for four Emmys dating back to 1954. She has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for her movie and television work.
From Newark to the Actors Studio
Saint was born July 4, 1924, in Newark, N.J., and grew up in Albany and Delmar, N.Y. She enrolled at Bowling Green State University in Ohio intending to become a schoolteacher, a plan derailed when she auditioned for a school play and won a leading role.
She returned to New York and took a job as an NBC page. Her first television role came on the game show “Campus Hoopla,” and she began working steadily in live television in the late 1940s. Saint built a career in radio, television and theater in New York City before making Los Angeles her home in 1956.
A Big-Screen Comeback in Her 80s
After scaling back her career to raise a family, Saint returned to blockbuster filmmaking in her 80s, playing Clark Kent’s adoptive mother, Martha Kent, in the 2006 release “Superman Returns.” She also appeared in “Because of Winn-Dixie,” in the 2014 fantasy “Winter’s Tale” alongside Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe, adapted from Mark Helprin’s novel, and in the 2019 nun drama “Mariette in Ecstasy.” In 2021 she played Marisa Tomei’s aunt in the audio play “The Bus Ride,” part of “The Pack Podcast.”
Saint was married to television and stage director Jeffrey Hayden for 65 years, until his death in December 2016. She is survived by her children, Darrell and Laurette, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Sources:
https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/10/06/on-the-waterfront-oscar-winner-eva-marie-saint-dies-at-102/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqze43ky1xgdo
https://www.nprillinois.org/2026-10-06/actress-eva-marie-saint-who-won-an-oscar-for-on-the-waterfront-dies-at-102
https://www.komu.com/news/nationworld/eva-marie-saint-oscar-winning-film-star-of-on-the-waterfront-dead-at-102/article_b337b29e-1e4c-5844-8eb9-72ef77655788.html
https://www.fox9.com/news/eva-marie-saint-oscar-winning-on-waterfront-north-northwest-star-dies-102