Academy Award-winning actor Eva Marie Saint has died. She was 102.
The star of stage and screen died from natural causes in Los Angeles on Tuesday, according to an announcement that says she was surrounded by family and loved ones.
Saint’s career got off to a fast start in 1954 when she starred alongside Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront,” whom she remembered as “really adorable… and, you know, a little frightening” during a 2014 Turner Movie Classics interview.
She was honored with an Academy Award for her supporting role in that Elia Kazan classic.
The New Jersey native, raised in New York, also worked on Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” She starred with Bob Hope in “That Certain Feeling” and appeared opposite Paul Newman in “Exodus.”
More recently, she was seen in the 2014 film “Winter’s Tale” starring Colin Farrell. In 2006, she played Superman’s adoptive mother Martha Kent in “Superman Returns.” She also played the mom of Cybill Shepherd’s character in the popular 1980s sitcom “Moonlighting.”
Saint was brought up in Albany and Delmar and attended Bowling Green State University in Ohio with hopes of becoming a schoolteacher, her obituary reads. That plan was sidetracked when she tried out for a school play and landed a leading role.
Saint worked in radio, television and theater in New York City before making Los Angeles her home in 1956.
She won an Emmy Award for the 1990 mini-series “People Like Us.” She’d previously been nominated for four Emmys dating back to1954.
Saint was married to Jeffrey Hayden for 65 years before his death in December 2016. She’s survived by her children, Darrell and Laurette, as well as four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Saint told the Santa Barbara Independent in 2010 that her agent wanted her to work more than what she had in mind while raising two young children.
“I would turn things down, and he would tell me that I would never be a super-superstar if I didn’t work more,” she recalled. “So I said, ‘I guess I don’t want to be a super-superstar.’ I want to continue working, but my family always comes first. And that’s how I’ve always felt.”
