(CNN) — Eva Marie Saint, the Academy Award-winning actress who excelled in roles opposite such stars as Cary Grant and Marlon Brando, has died, according to her publicist Jeff Sanderson. She was 102.
Saint won her Oscar for her movie debut in “On the Waterfront,” costarring with Brando in the breakout 1954 drama from director Elia Kazan. Her most memorable role, however, came five years later, as Eve Kendall, the cool double agent – tasked with wooing Grant – in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” one of the director’s signature thrillers.
In a 2014 interview, Saint recalled working with Hitchcock, saying that the director never discussed emotion with her but told her to lower her voice and “always, in my scenes with Cary Grant, look directly into his eyes, which was not difficult.”
Born in New Jersey on the Fourth of July, Saint began acting in college and subsequently moved to New York, landing roles in radio plays and television.
Saint studied at the acclaimed Actors Studio, working with Kazan and Lee Strasberg, the renowned acting coach. They worked on what came to be known as Method acting, with Brando, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman and Geraldine Page among other famous students.
“Think of your body as an instrument, a musical instrument,” Saint recalled Strasberg telling her, in a 2001 interview. “So take care of your body. You have to be disciplined and you should be able to play what that director wants.”
Saint appeared in a number of films in the 1960s, including “Exodus” (with Newman), “The Sandpiper” and the Cold War comedy “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!”
She stayed active in television, portraying Edith Wilson in the 1974 movie “The First Woman President,” and recurring as Cybill Shepherd’s character’s mother on the popular ‘80s series “Moonlighting.”
Saint received several Emmy nominations, winning for the miniseries “People Like Us,” based on a Dominick Dunne novel. She continued to appear in movies well into her 80s and 90s, including “Because of Winn-Dixie” and “Superman Returns.”
Saint married producer-director Jeffrey Hayden in 1951 – they met on a subway in New York – and the two stayed together for 65 years, until his death in 2016. They had two children, and Saint was actually pregnant when she accepted the Academy Award in 1955.
Early in their marriage, Hayden directed Saint an episode of the 1950s CBS series “Omnibus.” The couple later collaborated on several plays and performed together on stage in “Love Letters.”
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