Eva Marie Saint dies at 102, the last great lead of On the Waterfront

Eva Marie Saint died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, of natural causes, surrounded by family. She was 102. Family representative Jeff Sanderson confirmed the death. Until that afternoon she was the oldest living winner of an Academy Award, and one of the last leads still alive from the Hollywood films of the 1950s.

The Oscar came for her first film. In Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, released in 1954, she played Edie Doyle, the sister of a murdered longshoreman and the woman who pulls Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy toward the waterfront commission. She won best supporting actress at the ceremony in 1955. The New York Times, in its obituary published this week, noted that she had already been a working actress for eight years, almost all of it in live television, before that debut.

From a three-camera studio to Hitchcock

Live television in the late 1940s was a three-camera job with no second take. Saint said later that the noise and the clock forced a kind of concentration she kept. Kazan cast her opposite Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden and Rod Steiger, in a film the American Film Institute has kept near the top of its list of American movies. Edie is often described as the conscience of the picture. The performance is quieter than that label. She plays a woman who has come to identify a body and stays to ask who ordered the killing.

Five years later Alfred Hitchcock put her opposite Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Eve Kendall is the woman on the 20th Century Limited who takes Grant's Roger Thornhill into a compartment and, the audience learns, is already working for the intelligence service hunting him. The two roles are the range she was given in a single decade: a Hoboken mourner in a cloth coat, and a spy in a suit on a train. She has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

A marriage of 65 years, and a late Emmy

Saint married the director Jeffrey Hayden. The marriage lasted 65 years, until his death in 2016. They had two children, who survive her. In 1990 she won an Emmy for People Like Us, playing the rich widow Lil Van Degan Altemus. It was a television award at the far end of a career that had started in television, before the film debut that fixed her name.

She was born in 1924. A child who had played an angel in school pageants, as the Times obituary recorded, outlived Brando by 22 years and Hitchcock by 46. The practical consequence for archives is small and concrete. Interviews she gave in the last decade are now the last first-person account of the Waterfront set from its female lead. Kazan, Brando, Cobb and Steiger are already gone.

What remains on the two films

On the Waterfront is still taught as a film about testimony, unions and informing, and as Kazan's answer to his own appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Saint's Edie is the character who does not have that argument. She wants a name. North by Northwest is taught as Hitchcock's map of America, from New York to Mount Rushmore, with Eve Kendall as the figure who is not what the first hour says she is.

Sanderson's confirmation gives the date and the place: Tuesday, at home in Los Angeles, natural causes, family present. The rest of the record is the work. A supporting-actress Oscar in 1955 for a first film. A Hitchcock lead in 1959. An Emmy in 1990. Two children. A marriage that ended in 2016. At 102 she was the oldest Oscar winner alive. That description now belongs to someone else.