Eva

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Lore & Background

Saint made her feature film debut in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), opposite Marlon Brando. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress along with a BAFTA nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. She then starred as Eve Kendall in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), a landmark thriller that became one of the defining films of both Hitchcock's career and the suspense genre. In the 1960s, Saint appeared in Exodus (1960), The Sandpiper, 36 Hours, The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, and Grand Prix (1966). From the 1970s onward, she worked primarily in television and on stage, later winning a Primetime Emmy Award for the television miniseries People Like Us (1990). Her most recent theatrical film appearance was in Winter's Tale (2014). For her contributions to motion pictures and television, Saint received two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In Their Own Story

Director Alfred Hitchcock surprised many by choosing Saint over dozens of other candidates for the femme fatale role in North by Northwest (1959) with Cary Grant and James Mason. Hitchcock worked with Saint to make her voice lower and huskier, and personally chose costumes for her during a shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman in New York City. In a 2000 interview, Saint recalled, "[Grant] would say, 'See, Eva Marie, you don't have to cry in a movie to have a good time. Just kick up your heels and have fun.' Hitchcock said, 'I don't want you to do a sink-to-sink movie again, ever. You've done these black-and-white movies like On the Waterfront. It's drab in that tenement house. Women go to the movies, and they've just left the sink at home. They don't want to see you at the sink.'"

Reader's Guide

Saint's career began on television as an NBC page, appearing in the live NBC-TV show Campus Hoopla in 1946–47. She appeared in a 1947 Life special about television, and also in a 1949 feature Life article about her as a struggling actress. In 1954, Saint won the Outer Critics Circle Special Award for her Broadway stage role in the Horton Foote play The Trip to Bountiful (1953). In 1955, Saint was nominated for her first Emmy for "Best Actress In A Single Performance" on The Philco Television Playhouse, playing the young mistress of middle-aged E. G. Marshall in Middle of the Night by Paddy Chayefsky. She won another Emmy nomination for the 1955 television musical version of Our Town, adapted from the Thornton Wilder play of the same name, co-starring Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. Her success and acclaim in TV productions were of such a high level that "one slightly hyperbolic primordial TV critic dubbed her 'the Helen Hayes of television.'"

Did You Know?

• Saint is the earliest surviving and oldest living Academy Award winner.
• She received $7,500 for her Oscar-winning role in On the Waterfront.
• Hitchcock personally chose Saint's costumes for North by Northwest during a shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman in New York City.
• Saint's appearance in On the Waterfront is referenced in the lyrics of the 1984 song 'Rattlesnakes' by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.
• A theater on the campus of Bowling Green State University is named after Saint.