Eva Marie Saint

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 and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. As of July 2024^[update], Saint is the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner. She is one of the last living stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Saint graduated from Bowling Green State University and began her career as a television and radio actress in the late 1940s. She played the role of Thelma in Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful (1953). She made her 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.

From then on, Saint appeared in a variety of films, including Raintree County (1957), opposite Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor; and Fred Zinnemann's A Hatful of Rain (1957), opposite Don Murray and Anthony Franciosa, for which she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama; and Eve Kendall in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), opposite Cary Grant. In the 1960s, Saint appeared in Exodus (1960), alongside Paul Newman; The Sandpiper (1965), which reunited her with Elizabeth Taylor and featured Richard Burton; 36 Hours (1965) with James Garner; The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966), alongside Carl Reiner and Alan Arkin; and John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), opposite Yves Montand and in her second film with James Garner.

Saint was born on July 4, 1924 in Newark, New Jersey to John Merle Saint and Eva Marie (née Rice) Saint. Her parents were Quakers. She attended Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar, New York, graduating in 1942. Saint studied acting at Bowling Green State University, where she joined the Delta Gamma sorority. During this time, she played the lead role in a production of Personal Appearance. She was an active member in the theater honorary fraternity, Theta Alpha Phi, and served as record keeper of the student council in 1944. Saint graduated from Bowling Green in 1946, and a theater on its campus is named after her.

Saint's introduction to television began as an NBC page. She appeared in the live NBC-TV show Campus Hoopla in 1946–47. Her performances on this program are recorded on rare kinescope, and audio recordings of these telecasts are preserved in the Library of Congress. She also appeared in Bonnie Maid's Versa-Tile Varieties on NBC in 1949 as one of the original singing "Bonnie Maids" used in the live commercials.

Saint appeared in a 1947 Life special about television, and also in a 1949 feature Life article about her as a struggling actress earning minimum amounts from early TV while trying to make ends meet in New York City.

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 which she co-starred with actresses such as Lillian Gish and Jo Van Fleet.

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-stars were 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.'"