Eva
The earliest surviving and oldest living Academy Award winner, and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Eva Marie Saint (born July 4, 1924) is an American retired actress. In a career spanning more than seven decades, she received an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for two BAFTA Awards and a Golden Globe Award. Saint is the earliest surviving and oldest living Academy Award winner and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. She graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1946 and began her career as a television and radio actress in the late 1940s.
Quick Facts
- Role
- Actress
- Status
- Retired
- Key location
- Newark, New Jersey (born)
- Bowling Green State University (education)
- New York
- Discovery
- Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for On the Waterfront (1954)
Lore & Background
Saint made her feature film debut in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), opposite Marlon Brando. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress along with a BAFTA nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. She then starred as Eve Kendall in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), a landmark thriller that became one of the defining films of both Hitchcock's career and the suspense genre.
In the 1960s, Saint appeared in Exodus (1960), The Sandpiper, 36 Hours, The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, and Grand Prix (1966). From the 1970s onward, she worked primarily in television and on stage, later winning a Primetime Emmy Award for the television miniseries People Like Us (1990). Her most recent theatrical film appearance was in Winter's Tale (2014). For her contributions to motion pictures and television, Saint received two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Reader's Guide
Saint's career began on television as an NBC page, appearing in the live NBC-TV show Campus Hoopla in 1946–47. She appeared in a 1947 Life special about television, and also in a 1949 feature Life article about her as a struggling actress. In 1954, Saint won the Outer Critics Circle Special Award for her Broadway stage role in the Horton Foote play The Trip to Bountiful (1953). In 1955, Saint was nominated for her first Emmy for "Best Actress In A Single Performance" on The Philco Television Playhouse, playing the young mistress of middle-aged E. G. Marshall in Middle of the Night by Paddy Chayefsky.
She won another Emmy nomination for the 1955 television musical version of Our Town, adapted from the Thornton Wilder play of the same name, co-starring Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. Her success and acclaim in TV productions were of such a high level that "one slightly hyperbolic primordial TV critic dubbed her 'the Helen Hayes of television.'"
Did You Know?
- She received $7,500 for her Oscar-winning role in On the Waterfront.
- Hitchcock personally chose Saint's costumes for North by Northwest during a shopping trip to Bergdorf Goodman in New York City.
- Saint's appearance in On the Waterfront is referenced in the lyrics of the 1984 song 'Rattlesnakes' by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.
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