Eva Marie Saint, ‘North by Northwest’ Star, Dies at 102 — SkimNews
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- Eva Marie Saint died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles at age 102, with no cause of death cited in the source.
- She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront" (1955) opposite Marlon Brando, a role Kazan cast her in after her performance in the 1953 TV drama "The Trip to Bountiful."
- As Eve Kendall in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" (1959), she played a spy who stayed "two or three steps ahead" of Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill — "much more than a standard damsel in distress," per Variety's 2024 appreciation.
- One of the first breakout talents from early television, Saint held two separate stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — one for motion pictures and one for TV — and earned her first paycheck as an off-camera applauder on "The Borden Show."
- After four prior Emmy nominations, she finally won the statuette in 1990 for the NBC miniseries "People Like Us," then returned to film as Martha Kent in "Superman Returns" (2006); her final big-screen role was in "Winter's Tale" (2014).
- Beyond acting, Saint was a longtime advocate for cell-phone-free driving — creating her own bumper sticker reading "Get Off The Phone Or Get Off The Road" — and served on the Academy's Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship Committee.
Why it matters: Saint's death at 102 removes what the source identifies as the oldest living Oscar winner from Hollywood's living memory — a rare bridge between golden-age cinema and the television era. Her dual Walk of Fame stars (one for film, one for TV) mark her as one of the last direct links to the live-TV anthologies that launched her, and her seven-decade arc places her among the longest-tenured Oscar winners in Academy history.
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