Eva Marie Saint Won an Oscar on Her First Try and Lived to 102

Eva Marie Saint, the Newark-born actress who won an Academy Award for the first movie she ever made and then spent the next seven decades refusing to be anybody's contract player, has died at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102.

Her death was confirmed by family representative Jeff Sanderson, according to an Associated Press obituary carried by Breitbart News. The wire report said she died Tuesday and gave no cause. No family statement, funeral plans or survivors' list had appeared in the copy available as of this writing.

That she made it to 102 is remarkable on its own. That she was still working in her 90s says something about the kind of career she built: small, deliberate, and almost entirely on her own terms in an era when the studios expected actresses to sign their lives away for seven years at a stretch.

A debut that ended at the podium

Saint was born July 4, 1924 — Eva Marie Saint was her real name, not a press agent's invention. Her father managed for the Goodrich Rubber Co., and the family settled in Delmar, New York, outside Albany. She went to Bowling Green State University in Ohio, tried out for a play on a whim and won the lead.

The early work was humble. A two-line radio bit as a telephone operator. Two years playing Claudia on the serial "One Man's Family." Six months understudying Jocelyn Brando in "Mister Roberts" without ever once going on. She auditioned for Elia Kazan, got into the Actors Studio, and credited Lee Strasberg with knocking the shyness out of her.

"I finally did the scene, and I cried, and my peers were crying with me," she told The Santa Barbara Independent in 2009.

Then came the screen test opposite Marlon Brando for "On the Waterfront." She described it to the Los Angeles Times in 2001 in one sentence: "Kazan saw the sparks fly, and that's how I got the part." The 1954 picture made her a best supporting actress winner on her first film. She was pregnant at the ceremony, took the statuette from Frank Sinatra, and told the room, "I think I may have the baby right here." Her son Darrell arrived two days later. Daughter Laurette followed in 1958.

The roles she turned down

Hollywood offered her the standard bargain and she declined it. Saint refused studio contracts and made only seven films in her first decade in the business. She passed on "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," "Summer and Smoke" and "The Rainmaker." What she did make counted: "Exodus," "Raintree County," "All Fall Down," and "That Certain Feeling" opposite Bob Hope in 1956.

The one everybody remembers is Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" in 1959, with Saint starring opposite Cary Grant. She later said her husband, television and stage director Jeffrey Hayden, pushed her to take it.

"He was so right. And that's what husbands are for," she told Vanity Fair in 2014.

She and Hayden were married 65 years, until his death in 2016.

A long second act

The 1980s brought her back to a new audience: Cybill Shepherd's mother on "Moonlighting," Tom Hanks' mother in "Nothing in Common." She won an Emmy for the 1990 miniseries "People Like Us." Younger moviegoers knew her from "Because of Winn-Dixie," from "Superman Returns," and from "Winter's Tale," adapted from the Mark Helprin novel. As recently as 2021 she turned up as Marisa Tomei's aunt in an audio play, "The Bus Ride," part of The Pack Podcast.

A note on sourcing: the details above come from a single Associated Press obituary as republished by Breitbart. Newsmax and other outlets have carried versions of the story, but we have not independently reviewed them. Several headlines circulating after her death described Saint as the oldest living Oscar winner; that claim has not been verified here and is not asserted.

Still unanswered are the cause of death, the exact date beyond "Tuesday," and whether the family intends a public memorial. Statements from the Academy, the Actors Studio and Bowling Green State University have not yet surfaced. For an actress whose first film role ended with a trip to the Oscar podium and who was still taking work in her 90s, the retrospectives will take a while.