Eva Marie Saint
Eva Marie Saint

LOS ANGELES — Eva Marie Saint, the actress who won an Academy Award for her first film, as Edie Doyle opposite Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront," and who played the woman who picks up Cary Grant on a train in "North by Northwest," died Tuesday at her home. She was 102.

She died of natural causes, surrounded by family, family representative Jeff Sanderson said. She was the oldest living Oscar winner and one of the last stars of the studio era still working into her 90s.

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Saint was born July 4, 1924, in East Orange, New Jersey, the younger of two daughters, and grew up in Delmar, New York. Her father, John Merle Saint, was an executive at B.F. Goodrich. Her mother, Eva Marie Rice Saint, had been a teacher. She started in live television in the late 1940s. A 1953 broadcast of Horton Foote's "The Trip to Bountiful," with Lillian Gish, drew Elia Kazan, who cast her as Edie in the 1954 waterfront picture.

She won the supporting-actress Oscar in 1955. She was pregnant. From the stage she said, "I may have the baby right here." The child did not arrive that night. She and the producer-director Jeffrey Hayden, whom she had met on a New York subway and married in 1951, had two children. The marriage lasted 65 years, until his death in 2016 at 90.

Five years after the Oscar she was Eve Kendall in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," the supposed stranger in the dining car who tells Grant's fugitive advertising man, "It's going to be a long night," and turns out to be neither stranger nor bystander. The two performances are the ones the American Film Institute lists. She was not a conventional movie star between them. She went back to television and the stage, won an Emmy in 1990 as the widow Lil Van Degan Altemus in "People Like Us," and kept taking parts into her 80s and 90s, including "Because of Winn-Dixie" and "Superman Returns."

She had two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Late in the career she said, "I still have the energy and the health to pick and choose." The choosing stopped Tuesday. The debut that won the Oscar was 72 years ago. The Hitchcock train scene was 67. She was the last of that cast still here, and then she was not.

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