Eva Marie Saint, who won an Academy Award for her very first film, playing opposite Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront,” and who later played a cool, calculating spy for director Alfred Hitchcock, died at her home in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026. She was 102.

She died of natural causes, with family and loved ones around her, family representative Jeff Sanderson said. At her death she was the oldest surviving Oscar winner, and among the last surviving stars of Hollywood’s golden age.

An Oscar for Her First Movie

Hardly any screen career has opened so emphatically. Her debut role — Edie Doyle in director Elia Kazan’s 1954 crime drama “On the Waterfront” — brought her the Academy Award for best supporting actress. Edie was the picture’s moral center and the love interest of Brando’s conflicted boxer-turned-docker.

Saint was nine months pregnant when she accepted the award. “I may have the baby right here!” Saint quipped from the stage. Her son was born two days later.

Brando was a committed method actor, and Saint, in an interview with Turner Classic Movies, recalled finding him both endearing and slightly unnerving. Before joining the Actors Studio in New York — the home of method acting, which Kazan co-founded — she had trained at the Herbert Berghof Studio.

Hitchcock’s Blonde and a Selective Career

Five years on, she took the role of femme fatale Eve Kendall in Hitchcock’s 1959 spy thriller “North by Northwest,” seducing, then falling for, the advertising executive played by Cary Grant. Her husband, she said, had talked her into it.

Stardom did not translate into volume. Across her first decade in Hollywood she made only seven films, turning down “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” with Gregory Peck, “Summer and Smoke” with Laurence Harvey and “The Rainmaker” with Burt Lancaster. Her agent, she said, warned that she would never reach the top tier of stardom if she kept saying no.

“I want to continue working, but my family always comes first,” she told the Santa Barbara Independent in 2010.

What she did accept ranged across genres and decades: “That Certain Feeling,” opposite Bob Hope; Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” in 1960, with Paul Newman; and John Frankenheimer’s “All Fall Down,” with Warren Beatty. Television cast her as the mother of Cybill Shepherd’s character on the 1980s sitcom “Moonlighting,” and handed her an Emmy Award in 1990 for the wealthy widow Lil Van Degan Altemus in the miniseries “People Like Us.” In all she drew four Emmy nominations, dating back to 1954. She has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, recognizing her movie and television work.

From Newark to the Actors Studio

Born July 4, 1924, in Newark, N.J., Saint grew up in Albany and Delmar, N.Y. She enrolled at Bowling Green State University in Ohio intending to become a schoolteacher, a plan derailed when she auditioned for a school play and won a leading role.

Back in New York, she took a job as an NBC page. The game show “Campus Hoopla” gave her a first television role, and by the late 1940s she was working steadily in live television. She built a career in radio, television and theater in New York City, then made Los Angeles her home in 1956.

A Big-Screen Comeback in Her 80s

Saint had scaled back her career to raise a family, and she returned to blockbuster filmmaking in her 80s as Martha Kent, Clark Kent’s adoptive mother, in the 2006 release “Superman Returns.” Other late credits included “Because of Winn-Dixie”; the 2014 fantasy “Winter’s Tale,” adapted from Mark Helprin’s novel, alongside Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe; and the 2019 nun drama “Mariette in Ecstasy.”

She worked in animation as well, voicing the elderly Katara in Nickelodeon’s “The Legend of Korra,” which arrived in 2012. Mae Whitman had voiced the young Katara in “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” As of Oct. 9, animation fan accounts and fan wikis were mourning her chiefly for that role.

The animation account ToonHive posted on X on Oct. 6: “Eva Marie Saint, the elderly voice of Katara in ‘Avatar: The Legend of Korra,’ has sadly passed away at the age of 102.” By Thursday, Oct. 8, the post had been seen more than 750,000 times and liked about 68,000 times.

In a Threads post circulating as of Oct. 9, the fan account avatarnetflixtv_ wrote: “Hollywood has lost one of its greats.” The same post added: “Avatar fans have lost the voice of a beloved elder.”

Among her final credits, she played Marisa Tomei’s aunt in “The Bus Ride,” a 2021 audio play that formed part of “The Pack Podcast.”

Saint and television and stage director Jeffrey Hayden were married for 65 years, until his death in December 2016. She is survived by her children, Darrell and Laurette, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.