Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint dies aged 102

Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress known for landmark roles in Hollywood classics, has died aged 102 of natural causes at her Los Angeles home surrounded by family. Born in Newark in 1924, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her debut film role as Edie Doyle in Elia Kazan’s 1954 On the Waterfront and five years later played the calculating Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Accepting her Oscar while nine months pregnant, she gave birth two days later and went on to become the oldest surviving Oscar winner and one of the last living stars of Hollywood’s golden era.

Trained in New York at the Herbert Berghof Studio and the Actors Studio, she began in live television in the late 1940s and earned an Emmy in 1990 for the miniseries People Like Us. Known for working with intense performers like Marlon Brando and for Hitchcock’s carefully crafted exterior for her characters, her Kendall role helped shape the sophisticated, sexually confident blonde archetype seen in later spy films. She scaled back her career to raise a family with director Jeffrey Hayden, to whom she was married for 65 years, but returned to notable screen roles decades later, including Superman Returns (2006), Winter’s Tale and Mariette in Ecstasy, and leaves two children and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.