Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint is an American actress. She is best known for starring in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront and in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. She received Golden Globe and BAFTA Award nominations for A Hatful of Rain and won a Primetime Emmy Award for the television miniseries People Like Us. Upon the death of Olivia de Havilland in 2020, she became the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner.

About Eva Marie Saint in brief

Summary Eva Marie SaintEva Marie Saint is an American actress. She is best known for starring in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront and in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Her film career also includes roles in Raintree County, Exodus, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming, Grand Prix, Nothing in Common, Because of Winn-Dixie, Superman Returns, and Winter’s Tale. She received Golden Globe and BAFTA Award nominations for A Hatful of Rain and won a Primetime Emmy Award for the television miniseries People Like Us. Upon the death of Olivia de Havilland in 2020, she became the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Saint was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Quaker parents: Eva Marie and John Merle Saint. She attended Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar, New York, near Albany, graduating in 1942. She studied acting at Bowling Green State University and joined Delta Gamma Sorority. She was an active member in the theater honorary fraternity, Theta Alpha Phi, and served as record keeper of the student council in 1944. Saint’s introduction to television began as an NBC page. She appeared in the live NBC-TV show Campus Hoopla in 1946–47.

Her performances on this program are recorded on rare kinescope, and audio recordings of these telecasts are preserved in the Library of Congress. In 1955, Saint was nominated for her first Emmy for 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. In 1953, she won the Drama Critics Award for her Broadway stage role in the Horton Foote play, The Trip to Bountiful, in which she co-starred with such formidable actors as Lillian Gish and Jo Van Fleet. Her success and acclaim in TV productions were of such a high level that one primordial TV critic dubbed her ‘the Helen Hayes of television. ‘\”Saint made her feature film debut in On The Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando and directed by Elia. Kazan put me in a room with Brando; he said ‘You’re not being used to being with a young man’ She appeared alongside Bob Hope in That Certain Feeling, which she received USD 50,000 for. In a 2000 interview, Saint recalled making the film, which has been highly influential, saying: “I remained off balance for the whole shoot”