Eva Marie Saint (born July 4, 1924) is an American retired actress of film, theatre, radio and television. In a career spanning 75 years, she has won an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award, alongside nominations for a Golden Globe Award and two British Academy Film Awards. Saint is both the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award-winner, and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
Born in New Jersey and raised in New York, Saint attended Bowling Green State University and began her career as a television and radio actress in the late 1940s. Among her notable early credits, she originated the role of Thelma in Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful (1953), originally an NBC telecast before being adapted into the Tony Award-winning play of the same name. For her performance in the stage version, she won an Outer Critics Circle Award. She made her film debut in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), opposite Marlon Brando. The film, which received eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Establishing her as an immediate star, it is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential films ever made.
From then on, Saint appeared in a variety of roles, including That Certain Feeling (1956), opposite Bob Hope; 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. One of her most notable roles came playing Eve Kendall opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).
Throughout the 1960s, Saint sustained a film presence with appearances in Exodus (1960), alongside Paul Newman; The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1965), alongside Carl Reiner and Alan Arkin; The Sandpiper (1965), which reunited her with Elizabeth Taylor and featured Richard Burton; and John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), opposite Yves Montand and acting in her second film with James Garner.
Saint gained consecutive nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Best Actress in a Single Performance for her appearances in the anthology series The Philco Television Playhouse (1954) and Producers' Showcase (1955). Beginning in the 1970s, her film career began to decline, though she garnered praise for her role opposite George Segal in Loving (1970). She gained additional consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations for How the West Was Won (1977) and Taxi!!! (1978), and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Special for the miniseries People Like Us (1990). Saint returned to film with Nothing in Common (1986), opposite Tom Hanks, and continued to act occasionally, notably in Superman Returns (2006), voicing Katara in The Legend of Korra (2012–2014) and Winter's Tale (2014) with Colin Farrell.