Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, to John Merle Saint and Eva Marie (née Rice) Saint, both of whom were Quakers. She attended Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar, New York, graduating in 1942, and went on to study acting at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where she joined the Delta Gamma sorority, participated in the theater honorary fraternity Theta Alpha Phi, and served as record keeper of the student council in 1944. During her time there she played the lead role in a production of Personal Appearance. She graduated from Bowling Green in 1946, and a theater on the campus was later named in her honor.

Saint began her professional career in television and radio in the late 1940s. Her entry into television came through a position as an NBC page, after which she appeared in the live NBC program Campus Hoopla from 1946 to 1947; audio recordings of those telecasts are preserved in the Library of Congress. She also appeared in Bonnie Maid's Versa-Tile Varieties on NBC in 1949 as one of the original singing Bonnie Maids featured in live commercials. A 1947 Life special on television included her, as did a 1949 Life feature article about her experiences as a struggling actress earning minimum wages from early television work in New York City.

Her Broadway career extended from 1953 to 1972 and included credits in The Trip to Bountiful and The Lincoln Mask. In The Trip to Bountiful, a Horton Foote play, she portrayed Thelma alongside actresses Lillian Gish and Jo Van Fleet. The role earned her a Theatre World Award in 1954 as well as the Outer Critics Circle Special Award. Her television work during the mid-1950s brought additional recognition: she received an Emmy nomination for Best Actress in a Single Performance for her role on The Philco Television Playhouse, playing the young mistress of a middle-aged E. G. Marshall in Paddy Chayefsky's Middle of the Night, and a second Emmy nomination followed for the 1955 television musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra also appeared.

Saint made her feature film debut in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront in 1954, opposite Marlon Brando, playing Edie Doyle, whose brother's death drives the film's central drama. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Saint received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, competing against Claire Trevor, Nina Foch, Katy Jurado, and Jan Sterling. She also earned a BAFTA nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. She was paid $7,500 for the role. In a 2000 interview in Premiere magazine, Saint described how Kazan placed her in a room with Brando and instructed her not to let him through the door, a dynamic that kept her off balance throughout the entire shoot.

Her subsequent film work brought further acclaim and a range of prominent collaborators. She appeared opposite Bob Hope in That Certain Feeling in 1956, for which she received $50,000, and then starred in the Civil War drama Raintree County in 1957 alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, for a fee of $100,000. That same year she appeared in Fred Zinnemann's A Hatful of Rain opposite Don Murray and Anthony Franciosa, earning a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama as well as a BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Actress. Alfred Hitchcock then cast her as Eve Kendall in North by Northwest in 1959, opposite Cary Grant and James Mason. Hitchcock worked with Saint to lower and deepen her voice and personally selected her costumes during a shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman in New York City. The film became a box-office success and ranks fortieth on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time.

Throughout the 1960s, Saint continued to appear in major productions. She starred in Exodus in 1960 alongside Paul Newman, and in The Sandpiper in 1965, which reunited her with Elizabeth Taylor and also featured Richard Burton. That same year she appeared in 36 Hours with James Garner, and in 1966 she appeared in both The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, alongside Carl Reiner and Alan Arkin, and John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix, opposite Yves Montand and again with James Garner.

Across a career spanning more than seven decades, Saint received an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. As of July 2024, she was the oldest living Academy Award winner and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.