Eva Marie Saint died on Tuesday, October 6, at her home in Los Angeles, where her representative, Jeff Sanderson, said she passed of natural causes “surrounded by family and loved ones.” She was 102, and at the time of her death she was the oldest living Oscar winner. For two weeks that brief statement was all the public knew. Now her death certificate, obtained by People, has filled in what happened in her final moments, and it lists more than one condition she had been living with.
Before we get there, remember how a model from New Jersey ended up on a Hoboken rooftop with Marlon Brando, and why she never let Hollywood swallow her whole.
How Did She Win an Oscar for Her Very First Film?
Saint was born in Newark, New Jersey, on July 4, 1924, and spent her early career in live television and on Broadway. Elia Kazan cast her as Edie Doyle, the gentle convent-school girl whose brother is murdered on the docks, in On the Waterfront. It was her first movie. Opposite Brando’s Terry Malloy, she gave the film its conscience, and in March 1955 she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
She accepted it very pregnant. “I may have the baby right here!” she joked from the stage, as she recalled to Mo Rocca of CBS Sunday Morning in 2014, and her son was born two days later. When Rocca asked whether she had campaigned for the award, she laughed at the idea. “I don’t think I knew what the word was,” she said. “Politicians campaigned.”
Four years later, a director with very particular tastes came calling.
What Did Hitchcock Tell Her to Do on ‘North by Northwest’?
Alfred Hitchcock picked Saint to play Eve Kendall, the cool, mysterious woman who seduces Cary Grant on a train in North by Northwest (1959). He wanted a very different Eva Marie Saint from the one audiences had cried with on the waterfront, and he told her exactly how to get there. “Lower your voice. Don’t use your hands. And look directly into Cary Grant’s eyes at all times,” she remembered on CBS Sunday Morning. The pairing worked so well that the dining car scene still crackles more than 65 years later.
Plenty of actresses would have chased that success with picture after picture. Saint didn’t. When an agent pushed her to work more, she told him, “I can’t. I can only do one a year, if that. I have children, young children.” He warned her she would never become a superstar, and she shrugged it off. “Well, I guess not,” she told CBS. Rocca once joked that her memoir should be called “How to Make It in Hollywood and Be a Normal Person”. “It would never sell,” she replied.
The reason she could walk away so easily had a name, and she met him on a New York subway.
How Did Her Marriage to Jeffrey Hayden Last 65 Years?
Jeffrey Hayden, a young director, first noticed her from behind. “He saw me on the subway,” Saint told NPR’s Scott Simon in 2014, explaining that she was carrying a modeling book with her name printed in small gold letters at the bottom. “He didn’t see me from the front. It was the back. Oh, and the way I walked. And that was the moment.” They married in October 1951.
Decades later, an earnest interviewer asked the couple for the secret of their long marriage. Saint gave a thoughtful answer about shared values and family, and then the interviewer turned to her husband. “And he said, sex,” she told NPR, still amused. At their next interview, she answered first, with the same word. “I got back at you, because you embarrassed me,” she said.
Hayden went on to direct episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, Leave It to Beaver and Mannix, and he directed his wife on stage in plays including Summer and Smoke and The Country Girl. He died at their Los Angeles home on December 24, 2016, at 90, after 65 years of marriage. Saint kept working long after most of her peers had stopped. She won a Primetime Emmy for the 1990 miniseries People Like Us, played Martha Kent, Superman’s adoptive mother, in Superman Returns (2006), and made her final theatrical film, Winter’s Tale, in 2014. She marked her 102nd birthday this past July 4, less than three months before she died.
So what finally took a woman who seemed to keep going forever?
What Was Eva Marie Saint’s Cause of Death?
According to the death certificate reported by People on October 20, Saint’s immediate cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, the moment the heart and breathing stop, and she died within seconds of its onset. The certificate lists senile dementia as a contributing cause. It also names hypertension, hyperthyroidism and an embolism as other significant conditions that contributed to her death. Parade and Female First have since carried People’s report. Her family has not spoken publicly about her final months beyond the original statement that she died at home among the people she loved.
That detail matters. After a century that took her from Newark to the Oscar stage and through 65 years beside the man from the subway, she was at home in Los Angeles at the end. She is survived by her children, Darrell and Laurette, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
She had her own way of looking at a long life. “The longer you live, I believe, you learn so much about life that you have more to give,” she told NPR when she was 89. She went on giving for another 13 years.