Eva Marie Saint, who starred in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, died Tuesday at 102.
The backstory: Saint grew up in Albany and Delmar, New York, trained at the Actors Studio, performed on Broadway and did live television in the late 1940s. Her first film came when she was almost 30.
- Kazan suggested she screen test with a young Marlon Brando. They played a scene in which her character is supposed to keep him out of her house.
What they're saying: "We were dancing, we were laughing, I was crying. He was taking my skirt and whipping it around, and the sparks flew. And Kazan saw that, and suddenly I was in On the Waterfront," she told Fresh Air in 2000.
Zoom in: In the 1954 film she played Edie, a Catholic schoolgirl pulled into Hoboken union corruption after her longshoreman brother is murdered. The performance won her an Academy Award.
The big picture: Five years later she played the femme fatale Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant in Hitchcock's 1959 North by Northwest, a complete inversion of the chaste role that made her name.
- She married director Jeffrey Hayden in 1951 and limited her roles to spend more time with her children. She returned to television in the 1970s and won an Emmy in 1990 for the miniseries People Like Us.
Why it matters: Saint won an Oscar for her first movie and kept working across seven decades, from live 1940s television onward. Her two defining roles bridge the Kazan and Hitchcock eras of American film, and she played them five years apart.
