Eva Marie Saint obituary: Oscar-winning star of On the Waterfront and North by Northwest

How do we remember Eva Marie Saint? Well, she starred opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). Kissed him, and a swollen-eyed Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). She won an Academy Award for that role – Edie, her first – and we might know that, heavily pregnant at the ceremony, she jested from onstage, “I may have the baby right here!”

It’s these films, two of the most enduring to have emerged from the 1950s, that many of us recall when we think of this blonde and fine-boned actress, who worked a total 60 years in the business. But what else is she known for? That we have to ask is unusual for a performer whom one couldn’t call forgotten or overlooked – no Hitchcock heroine is ever ‘lost’ – and is peculiar because Saint was neither character actress nor a supporting one, but a top-billing lead in her prime.

It’s true to say that Saint – married before making her first film, On the Waterfront, in 1954 – had an easy time of keeping her private life out of Picturegoer and other movie magazines. No scandal attached itself to her, no infidelity, no second marriage, and she was seldom in more than one feature a year. She appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1954, but was not a fashion icon like fellow Hitchcock blonde Grace Kelly, and not a sex symbol like Elizabeth Taylor, with whom she shared an agent. She paced herself, choosing her children over stardom – but this alone does not explain her relative elusiveness. Saint isn’t so often talked about because she was one of those actors who faced toward the movie industry, rather than outward to the movie-going public. She belonged to actors and directors.

From a young age, Eva Marie Saint, who has died at 102, had designs on a career as a third-grade teacher. After being encouraged at college to take a role in a play and enjoying it, she realised she’d been performing in one way or another on the hockey and basketball teams, in the chorus and as a cheerleader, but – as she put it – “always with other people”.

Sportsmanship was of utmost importance to Saint. It’s significant that, in a 2011 interview with David Poland, what most visibly moved her was not discussion of her Quaker parents or her beloved husband director Jeffrey Hayden – all of whom invariably made it into press interviews by her own engineering – but an anecdote about professional solidarity at the Actors Studio. She believed that, in giving her a specific text, her tutor Lee Strasberg had intuited a weakness in her performance range, and she described acting that scene before an audience of peers. The scene demanded she cry and, succeeding, “the other actors cried with me, and it was a breakthrough. And I’ll never forget that.”

In a separate conversation with Ben Mankiewicz during the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival, she was full of praise for Kazan’s on-set presence, lamenting that so few of her subsequent directors had lived up to his level of envelopment in the filmmaking process. “It was like teamwork. He was rooting for you.”

Her filmography evidences a deep-rooted conviction that acting was, for Saint, ensemble work, about communality and altogether-ness. Many of her most notable films featured all-star casts or were woven of multiple storylines – like the love triangle melodrama Raintree County (1957), Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960) and That Certain Feeling (1956), in which she starred alongside Bob Hope, George Sanders and Pearl Bailey.

In Fred Zinnemann’s three-hander A Hatful of Rain (1957) Saint played a young homemaker, living in a Brooklyn project with her husband Johnny and his brother Polo. Johnny is addicted to morphine following his hospitalisation in the Korean War, and keeps his compulsions secret from Saint’s Celia. Celia is breathless with trying to second-guess his negligence and erratic behaviour. The weariness of Saint’s newlywed – whose love for her husband has suffered so much that she might almost leave him for his brother who, more than Johnny, resembles the man she married – demonstrates a maturity of performance and mind that is striking.

Saint gave one of her most accomplished performances as Echo in director John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down (1962). The combined talent of the film’s cast – Karl Malden, Angela Lansbury and Warren Beatty in main roles – might have earned this coming-of-age drama the recognition it deserved had it not been released the same year as the multiple Oscar-winning To Kill a Mockingbird.

Saint’s Echo is a Williamsian heroine, a sunbeam in a fur-collar coat who brings springtide to the routinely overcast Cleveland home of The Willarts. The unmarried daughter of Annabell Willart’s best friend – or as Echo good-humouredly refers to herself, “the old maid from Toledo” – is poised and independent, and purrs like an engine. (She can fix a motor, too, self-taught.) Her affection for the Willart’s youngest son, Clinton – “I mean I could just eat him up… He’s a real peach” – lessens none when she falls in love with their prodigal eldest, the brattish and destructive Berry-Berry.

Echo’s blithe exterior belies a tragic incident in her recent past, a relationship that has rehearsed her in a patience and magnanimity too good for the spoiled Berry-Berry. In a climactic exchange between the two lovers in the Willart’s basement, Echo resists his goading with dignity, which she maintains even as pressured to reveal how deep her forbearance runs: “You have given me all I expect of you, do you hear?”

Notwithstanding Beatty’s searing screen presence, Saint is singlehandedly responsible for the scene’s devastating and still delicate crescendo. That she manages to steer the character clear of cloying martyrdom with a line like “You are free as the day God made you” is something to marvel at. Put the great Joan Fontaine in the role and she’d have been hamstrung by the innocence of her face (which so suited her to the role of Mrs de Winter in Rebecca (1940), but may have stood to make her pathetic in a part like this) and hard-pressed to prevent this character’s dialogue from sounding sanctimonious.

Saint, though, had more in common with actress Julie Harris, another Strasberg student who started out in theatre. Each in their late twenties when they made their film debuts, both actresses invested young characters with an aura of experience, wrought in wrinkled brow and past laughter at their eyes. Neither, notably, had lighting clauses written into their contracts, unlike Saint’s co-star Cary Grant. Saint’s Edie in On the Waterfront and Harris’s Abra in Kazan’s East of Eden (1955) are empathy incarnate; both actresses had learned the art of listening.

Again, in Don’t Come Knocking (2005), under the direction of Wim Wenders, Saint thrived in an ensemble role as the mother of a walkabout westerns actor who breaks a binding contract when he wanders off the set of his latest movie. Howard Spence hasn’t spoken to his mother in 30 years, and Saint’s c’est-la-vie Lulu is funny for her friendly resilience in the face of abandonment by her only son.

When Howard hides out at her place in his old backyard of Elko, Nevada, Lulu covers for him, unprompted, when Tim Roth’s insurance agent turns up at her door in search of the fugitive star. One can see how Howard came by his acting ability: Saint’s Mrs Spence is a natural, unflappable liar, provoking least suspicion in the priggish Mr Sutter with such po-faced ripostes as “What’s an email?”

When Sutter visits again, she sees him first through the fly-screen door, and emits an “It’s you” like a sneeze. She invites him inside, offering cookies and milk. “What kind?” asks Mr Sutter, and the small pause in her answer between “Peanut butter” and “with little chips of butterscotch” is delightful and renders her difficult to read: she might be being cute; she might be dangerous; certainly, she’s enjoying herself. It’s an example of the fine-tuning of Saint’s line-readings, which hadn’t lost their edge or rich involution even by aged 81.

Saint wasn’t known for comedy, and yet to see her success of an appearance on CBS’s What’s My Line panel-show is to watch a woman more confident and comfortable in caricature than most other of the show’s celebrity ‘mystery guests’, male or female, in the course of the programme’s 25 years. Which is quite the point. Saint wasn’t known for anything in particular. The “sexy spy lady” – as she insisted on calling her character in North by Northwest – was a role she filled and vacated. She couldn’t become a go-to type, because no one role more than any other became her.

By the time of her death, she had worked extensively in all performance media. Her aptitude for theatre gained her the role of Edie and a life-long friend and mentor in silent actress Lillian Gish, with whom she starred in Horton Foote’s play A Trip to Bountiful on Broadway in 1953. With the advent of early television, she made waves in telecasts, performing live to home audiences of millions. She’d been eight years at this before ever setting foot on a film set, and returned to television later in her career to acclaim and an Emmy Award.

Always a workhorse, she wore a pedometer for Life magazine, which ran a feature about young actresses, living on paltry TV pay, making the rounds of auditions in New York. At 87, she echoed the feelings of her friend Angela Lansbury about not wanting to play the types of roles made available to women of her age: “a lady dying, or in a wheelchair or with a cane”. As she rightly insisted: “I still have the energy and the health to pick and choose.”

• Eva Marie Saint, 4 July 1924 to 6 October 2026