Eva Marie Saint, the actress who won an Academy Award for her very first film, “On the Waterfront,” opposite actor Marlon Brando and later played a cool, calculating spy for director Alfred Hitchcock, died Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102.
Jeff Sanderson, a family representative, said Saint died of natural causes, with family and loved ones around her. At her death she was the oldest surviving Oscar winner and among the last surviving stars of Hollywood’s golden age.
An Oscar on Her Debut
Saint played Edie Doyle, the moral center of director Elia Kazan’s 1954 crime drama and the love interest of Brando’s conflicted boxer-turned-docker, and won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.
Saint was nine months pregnant when she accepted the award, and her son was born two days later. “I may have the baby right here!” she quipped from the stage.
Brando was a committed method actor. Saint found him “adorable” but “a little frightening,” and told Turner Classic Movies, “I felt that he could see right through me.”
Saint trained at the Herbert Berghof Studio before joining the Actors Studio in New York, home of method acting, which Kazan co-founded.
Hitchcock and a Selective Career
Five years after her debut, Saint played the femme fatale Eve Kendall in Hitchcock’s 1959 spy thriller “North by Northwest,” seducing, then falling for, the advertising executive played by actor Cary Grant. Her husband, she said, had talked her into taking the role.
Across her first decade in Hollywood, Saint made only seven films, turning down roles opposite actors Gregory Peck in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” Laurence Harvey in “Summer and Smoke” and Burt Lancaster in “The Rainmaker.” Her agent, she said, warned she would never reach the top tier of stardom if she kept saying no.
The roles she took included “That Certain Feeling,” opposite actor Bob Hope; director Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” in 1960, with actor Paul Newman; and director John Frankenheimer’s “All Fall Down,” with actor Warren Beatty. She also appeared in “Raintree County” with actor Montgomery Clift, “The Stalking Moon” with Peck and “Grand Prix.”
On television, Saint played the mother of actress Cybill Shepherd’s character on the 1980s sitcom “Moonlighting.” She won an Emmy Award in 1990 as the wealthy widow Lil Van Degan Altemus in the miniseries “People Like Us.” Before that win she had drawn four Emmy nominations, dating back to 1954. Two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame recognize her movie and television work.
Martha Kent and Katara
Saint scaled back her career to raise a family. “Family always came first,” she told Moving Pictures Magazine in 2006. She returned to blockbuster filmmaking in her 80s as Martha Kent, Clark Kent’s adoptive mother, in the 2006 release “Superman Returns.”
Her other late credits included “Because of Winn-Dixie,” the 2014 fantasy “Winter’s Tale,” adapted from Mark Helprin’s novel, alongside actors Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe, and the 2019 nun drama “Mariette in Ecstasy.”
She voiced the elderly Katara in Nickelodeon’s “The Legend of Korra,” which arrived in 2012; Mae Whitman had voiced the young Katara in “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Among her final credits, Saint played actress Marisa Tomei’s aunt in “The Bus Ride,” a 2021 audio play that formed part of “The Pack Podcast.”
From Newark to Los Angeles
Saint was born July 4, 1924, in Newark, N.J., and grew up in Albany and Delmar, N.Y. She enrolled at Bowling Green State University in Ohio intending to become a schoolteacher, but the plan derailed when she auditioned for a school play and won a leading role. Back in New York, she took a job as an NBC page.
The game show “Campus Hoopla” gave her a first television role, and she then became a regular on “One Man’s Family.” By the late 1940s she was working steadily in live television. She built a career in radio, television and theater in New York City, then made Los Angeles her home in 1956.
Saint and television and stage director Jeffrey Hayden were married for 65 years, until his death in December 2016. She is survived by her children, Darrell and Laurette, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Fan tributes centered on her “Legend of Korra” role spread in the days after the Oct. 6 announcement. An X post by the animation account ToonHive pairing a photo of Saint with old Katara had been seen more than 750,000 times and liked about 68,000 times by Thursday, Oct. 8. The Threads account avatarnetflixtv_ wrote: “Hollywood has lost one of its greats.” It added separately: “Avatar fans have lost the voice of a beloved elder.”