Eva Marie Saint, who has died aged 102, made a lasting impression in two outstanding American films: as Edie Doyle, the wholesome, sensitive, Catholic girl who befriends the docker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954); and as Eve Kendall, the intriguing beauty helping and hindering the pursued advertising executive (Cary Grant) in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959).

In the latter, Saint, the coolest and wittiest of the “Hitchcock blondes”, was lit so beautifully that her fair skin looked like porcelain. In the scene when they first meet in the dining car of a Chicago-bound train, Saint and Grant deliver the double-edged banter with supreme style. Assessing him, she says, “Good taste in clothes. Good taste in food.” He continues, “Good taste in women – I like your flavour.”

The celebrated final sequence has Grant rescuing her while hanging precipitously over the side of Mount Rushmore, then dissolves to the Pullman car on the train where he is helping her up into his upper berth.

Variety noted that Saint had emerged as “a glamorous charmer”. If only her movie career had continued to be as shimmering. It started brilliantly with On the Waterfront, which gained her the best supporting actress Oscar, though, perversely, she was the female lead. It was a poignant performance in which Edie fights her love for Malloy, the brother of the man she believes killed her brother. “I didn’t say I didn’t love you,” she tells him. “I said stay away from me.”

Saint was born in New Jersey, the younger daughter of Quaker parents, John Merle Saint, a businessman, and his wife, Eva Marie (nee Rice), a former schoolteacher, and grew up in Delmar, New York. She claimed her inspiration came from her mother. “She was very strong, and self-sufficient. She made everything we ever wore ... Today she could have been a designer.”

Eva meant to become a teacher but, while studying at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, she became involved in dramatics. After college, she moved to New York City, soon establishing herself as a radio actor (she had a honeyed voice) and then in a number of television plays, one of which was Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful (1953) as the young friend and confidante of a browbeaten widow (Lillian Gish).

The play transferred to Broadway the same year, with almost the same cast, and because of Saint’s refreshing performance she was signed for On the Waterfront two weeks into the short run.

After her triumph in that film, she returned to television for two plays, Yellow Jack, with Broderick Crawford, and Our Town, with the unknown Paul Newman, just before his film debut. She was hardly stretched in her second big screen role as the ex-wife of a cartoonist (Bob Hope), now engaged to a cad (George Sanders), in the pleasant but forgettable romantic comedy That Certain Feeling (1956). Nevertheless, it proved she had some sass and sophistication, not seen again until Hitchcock brought it out three years later.

In the meantime, she had to be content with being wan and insipid in Raintree County (1957), in which she was unfairly pitted against a southern belle (Elizabeth Taylor) for the love of her beau (Montgomery Clift). Allowing her to pull out a few more stops was Fred Zinnemann’s A Hatful of Rain (also 1957), in which she played the pregnant wife of a heroin-addicted Korean war veteran (Don Murray).

Saint, who had married one of her television directors, Jeffrey Hayden, in 1951, was pregnant at the time and lost out to Joanne Woodward for a part opposite Newman again in The Long Hot Summer. However, she co-starred with Newman in Exodus (1960), Otto Preminger’s lengthy epic on the birth of the state of Israel. Saint was cast as a widowed US nurse who falls for the blue eyes and cause of the ship’s captain, played by Newman.

In John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down (1962) she was Echo O’Brien, the lodger who seduces a younger man (Warren Beatty). She was rather wasted in the absorbing thriller 36 Hours (1964) and accepted the thankless role of the steadfast wife of an adulterous pastor (Richard Burton) in Vincente Minnelli’s The Sandpiper (1965) only because she got equal star billing with Burton and Taylor – again as Saint’s voluptuous rival – and one-tenth of Burton’s half-million-dollar fee.

In Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966), billed as “the story of four drivers, the women behind them, the cars beneath them”, she was a fashion editor. There was more substance in The Stalking Moon (1969) as a white woman held captive for 10 years by Native Americans, who gives birth to a mixed-race son. But after playing another deceived wife, this time opposite George Segal in Loving (1970), and appearing with Hope again in the best-forgotten Cancel My Reservation (1972), she returned to more challenging parts in the theatre.

Among the plays were Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke (1973), The First Monday in October (1979) with Henry Fonda, both in touring companies, and Duet for One (1982) in Chicago and New York, in which she took on the difficult role of the violinist with multiple sclerosis, directed by Hayden, her husband.

But it was in TV films, some worthy, some worthwhile, that she was most visible in the latter part of her career. She explained that many of them could not be big feature films because, “How could they compete with all the special effects that movies have these days?” In the 1980s, she was convincingly cast as the mother of the model-turned-sleuth Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) in the successful TV series Moonlighting.

The only feature film she made in the 80s was Garry Marshall’s Nothing in Common (1986), in which she was impressive as the bitter and lonely mother of a yuppie (Tom Hanks). Saint returned to the big screen again a decade later in Time to Say Goodbye? (1997) as a woman coming to terms with her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease. One of her last films was the fantasy A New York Winter’s Tale (2014) in which, according to one critic, her appearance as a newspaper tycoon was “a beautiful reminder of her stature in American films. Her presence almost justifies the film’s existence. Almost.”

Television occupied most of her late career, and she was nominated for a number of Emmys. Yet Saint once remarked that “I never wanted to be in a sitcom because I never wanted to have an imaginary family. I had everything I needed from my real one.”

Hayden died in 2016. Saint is survived by their son, Darrell, and daughter, Laurette, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

• Eva Marie Saint, actor, born 4 July 1924; died 6 October 2026

• Ronald Bergan died in 2020