Eva Marie Saint – Actress
Born July 4, 1924; died October 6, 2026
It was a startling big screen debut that gave a wider audience for Saint, who had already made her mark on stage and television, where she was spotted by Kazan in Horton Foote’s play, The Trip to Bountiful. Kazan cast Saint in favour of Elizabeth Montgomery. As well deserved as her Best Supporting Actress Oscar undoubtedly was, the idea of her playing a supporting role didn’t come close to doing her justice.
This was evident too in what is probably Saint’s other most celebrated performance, when she played the infinitely more worldly-wise Eve Kendall in Alfred Hitchcock’s breathless thriller, North by Northwest (1959). As the duplicitous double agent – “a blonde who has all the answers” - Saint led Cary Grant on a merry dance from New York’s Central Station to Mount Rushmore. The pair made one of the smartest and sexiest double acts ever committed to screen.
Inbetween her two defining films Saint appeared with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra in a TV production of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town (1955), and played opposite Bob Hope in That Uncertain Feeling (1956). She featured in Fred Zinneman and Michael V. Gazzo’s addiction based drama, A Hatful of Rain (1957), and acted alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in deep south period piece, Raintree County (1957).
Instead of capitalising on such successes and becoming a Hollywood superstar, Saint was more selective in her roles. At points she sidestepped the spotlight entirely, either to focus on family life, or else moved back into TV and stage drama, because some of the film roles she was offered simply weren’t good enough.
Eva Marie Saint was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Quaker parents, John and Eva Marie Saint (nee Rice). She attended Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar, New York, and Bowling Green State University, Ohio, where a theatre was later named after her. After trying out for a school production of Lawrence Riley’s play, Personal Appearance, as a dare, she was cast in the lead role.
Saint began working as a page at NBC TV studio, before appearing in teen-based game show, Campus Hoopla (1946-47). She studied under Method guru Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and by 1953 was winning awards and appearing on Broadway in The Trip to Bountiful alongside silent movie legend Lillian Gish, who became her mentor. Following On the Waterfront, Saint was Emmy nominated for her performances in TV productions of Middle of the Night (1954) by Paddy Chayefsky, and Our Town (1955).
For the first half of the 1960s, Saint clocked up an impressive big screen CV. She was an American nurse working in a Jewish internment camp in Cyprus in Exodus (1960), and played the free spirited Echo O’Brien, doomed lover of Warren Beatty’s feckless drifter in All Fall Down (1962), John Frankenheimer’s film of Midnight Cowboy writer James Leo Herlihy’s novel.
Saint played an English-speaking nurse who becomes embroiled in a Nazi plot to dupe James Garner’s American major in 36 Hours (1965), and was the betrayed wife of Richard Burton’s headmaster in The Sandpiper (1965), in which Elizabeth Taylor also appeared. She was a magazine writer who has an affair with Yves Montand’s racing driver in Grand Prix 1966), and was at the heart of Norman Jewison’s Cold War comedy, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966).
In 1968, Saint played the mother of a half Native American boy in western, The Stalking Moon (1968), and the put upon wife of George Segal’s philandering magazine illustrator in Loving (1970). After playing Bob Hope’s wife in Cancel My Reservation (1972), Saint didn’t make another cinema film for fourteen years, when she played Tom Hanks’ mother in Garry Marshall’s comedy, Nothing in Common (1986).
Inbetween came a slew of TV films and guest roles in recurring dramas. Saint played Cybill Shepherd’s mother in Moonlighting (1985-89), and finally won her first Emmy award in 1990 for TV mini series, People Like Us. Later roles saw Saint play Sam Shepard’s mother in Wim Wenders’ western, Don’t Come Knocking (2005), and Superman’s mother in Superman’s Return (2006), which also featured a computer generated turn from her On the Waterfront co-star, Brando, as his father.
It was another eight years before Saint appeared again on screen, this time in romantic fantasy, Winter’s Tale (2014), in which she played a centenarian newspaper editor opposite Colin Farrell. In 2019 she appeared as a nun in Mariette in Ecstasy, a film made in 1996, and which had lain unreleased after the company behind it went bankrupt.
In 2018, she attended the Oscars to present the award for Best Costume Design, and received a standing ovation after commenting that she was older than the awards themselves. The adoration bestowed on Saint was for much more than her acquired elder stateswoman status, but was in acknowledgement of an integrity that saw her resist selling her talent short.
“I just prefer to do roles where it’s a strong lady and she’s not ill and she’s not in a wheelchair – and that may happen, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Saint said in a 2014 interview with metro.us on the back of Winter’s Tale. “But as long as I can portray somebody who still makes a difference in the world, that’s what I like to do.”
Saint is survived by her two children, Darrelle and Laurette, to her husband, director and producer Jeffrey Hayden, who pre-deceased her in 2016.
The Herald, October 8th 2026
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