Oscars

OSCAR-winner Eva Marie Saint, who has died aged 102, was a reluctant star who became a Hollywood legend.

From Alfred Hitchcock to Marlon Brando, the girl from New Jersey took on the biggest names in the business and triumphed.

She was nine months pregnant when she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in On The Waterfront in 1955, joking: “I may have the baby right here!”

Two days later her son — named Darrell, not Oscar — arrived.

Eva’s powerhouse performance alongside Marlon Brando was even more remarkable as it was her first film.

She had little truck with modern stars’ long acceptance speeches.

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The oldest living Oscar winner said of her two-sentence appearance: “That was a lot for someone to say in those days.

“Most people just said thank you and walked off the stage, which I loved.

“It’s gotten out of hand these days where people have to be funny and go on and on and on.”

With the worldwide success of follow-up movie North By Northwest, an agent pushed her to make more films and become a “superstar”.

Her reply was simple: “I can’t. I can only do one a year. I have young children.”

Her agent’s response was: “Well, I guess you won’t be a superstar.”

Her perfectly calm reply: “Well, I guess not.”

But she became one anyway, and her legendary beauty even inspired the 1984 song Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, on July 4, 1924, Eva was from a Quaker background.

“I was in the chorus in high school, not a soloist,” she once said.

“I was on the basketball team. I played the violin, part of the orchestra. I never wanted to be out there alone. Ever.”

She studied acting at university in Ohio, then moved to New York, working in theatre and television.

Her big break came in the Broadway play The Trip To Bountiful, where she caught the eye of director Elia Kazan, who cast the then 29-year-old alongside Brando in On The Waterfront.

She said: “Brando was wonderful. Probably the finest actor I’ve ever worked with.”

But he was fickle. She said: “I only saw him once after On The Waterfront.

Years later, Elizabeth Taylor was having a birthday party and he came into the room.

“He came up, we hugged, and he saw a pretty brunette over my shoulder. He said goodbye and that was the last time I ever saw him.”

With an Oscar under her belt, Hollywood was desperate to make the most of her stardust, but Eva didn’t want to leave her second baby, Laurette, to work on North By Northwest.

Hitchcock’s on-set abuse was well known, but to Eva he was the perfect English gent.

She said: “Hitchcock was a high-class guy. He always had a suit on.”

North By Northwest was a box office hit and one of the pinnacles of Eva’s career.

Going out one night with co-star Cary Grant, she saw how he was mobbed.

She said: “I couldn’t have coped with that kind of fame. I wanted a normal life.”

And when she filmed Exodus in 1960 with Paul Newman, she took family on location in Israel and Cyprus.

She met Jeffrey Hayden before she was famous and they married in 1951 — a union that lasted 65 years until his death in 2016.

Eva’s TV roles included playing Superman’s mother in 2006 and Cybill Shepherd’s mum in Eighties hit TV series Moonlighting.

For her 100th birthday all her family gathered for a big party at her home in Los Angeles.

Eva said: “I certainly don’t feel 100 years old.”

Yet her age didn’t slow her down and she led an active life, saying: “I take walks out in the fresh air, like watching baseball — especially the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“I enjoy time with family and friends. A good life.”

Bruce Davis spent more than two decades as the motion picture academy’s chief executive. Even when he retired in 2011, it was not because he didn’t still love the work. In fact, he kept at it in retirement, retaining an office at the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study where he focused on writing a definitive history of the early days of the Oscars.

“I don’t think I’ve been bored for a minute in 30 years here,” Davis told the Associated Press upon leaving the academy. “I feel like such a rube sometimes. To this day, when I get out of the car on Oscar night and step up there onto that carpet, you get that rush of energy. The lights are popping — not that anybody’s aiming at me — but still I think it’s one of the great rushes, emotionally speaking, that a person can have.”

Following a battle with leukemia, Davis died Saturday. He was 83.

Davis’ career at the academy was, according to wife Joann, partly a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

“Not that he wasn’t really good at what he did,” she says by phone. “But he was also a lucky man.”

Davis was working as chair of the theater department at Juniata College in Pennsylvania when he and Joann loaded all of their belongings atop their Mazda GLC and headed to Los Angles in pursuit of Hollywood dreams. Davis had been working on a few screenplays while teaching, and his agent told him needed to move closer to the action to network and take meetings.

“Neither of us had jobs when we left Pennsylvania,” Joann says. “We just bit the bullet and drove out. It was a leap of faith.”

Shortly after arriving, Davis met someone at a party whose wife worked at the motion picture academy. That soon led to Davis taking a job arranging lectures and seminars and, later, overseeing the organization’s public programming.

Davis became the academy’s seventh executive director in 1989, leading it through a sizable expansion of staff, relocating the academy’s Margaret Herrick Library to the Beverly Hills Waterworks building in 1991 and setting up its film archive at the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in 2002.

“Bruce would drive back and forth to work and see that Waterworks building at the time that they were looking for places for the library to expand,” Joann says. “And one day, it just occurred to him that maybe that would be a building, and so initiated conversation with Beverly Hills. It was kismet.”

Davis had hoped to build an academy museum next to the Pickford, convincing the group’s board of governors to purchase a nearby 3.5-acre site in 2006 for a reported $50 million, but the 2008 recession derailed those plans. His successor, Dawn Hudson, led the push to partner with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, eventually building the museum at the former May Co. building at Wilshire and Fairfax. It opened in 2021.

Davis was also instrumental in doubling the Oscars’ best picture category from five nominees to 10 in 2009, establishing the preferential ballot system that determines the academy’s top prize.

“That way, best picture reflects the choice of the greatest number of people,” Davis told The Times.

Davis’ Oscar book, “The Academy and the Award,” was first published in 2022, long after he originally anticipated it would hit stores.

“He thought a couple months of research, a couple more months to write it, and voila, in two years, he’d have it done,” Joann says. “But he kept finding new things he wanted to explore.”

Shortly before it published, Davis told The Times that he hoped the book would dispel myths surrounding the Oscars, including Susan Orlean’s assertion in her Rin Tin Tin biography that the dog received more votes than any male actor at the first Academy Awards and that Bette Davis gave the golden statue its nickname because its backside mirrored that of her then-husband Harmon Oscar Nelson.

“There’s a lot of nonsense out there,” Davis said, “and the real story is almost always more interesting.”

“He was deeply committed to preserving the academy’s history, establishing dedicated homes for our library and film archive, and relaunching the concept of creating a museum,” current academy CEO Bill Kramer and President Lynette Howell Taylor said in a statement. “He had a profound love for the academy.”

Davis loved to read and collect books, devouring anything from John Updike and Margaret Atwood, among other authors, a passion that necessitated having bookshelves in every room of his home. Language itself was an obsession, with many family dinners ending with Davis pulling out his unabridged Oxford English Dictionary to share the derivation of a word.

“He was a really fascinating guy,” Joann says.

Perhaps the only thing Davis didn’t like about the Oscars was the ceremony’s annual in memoriam segment, which pays tribute to those who died in the previous year.

“It is the single most troubling element of the Oscar show every year,” Davis told the Associated Press, “because more people die each year than can possibly be included in that segment.”

Next year’s ceremony now has one certain addition.

In addition to Joann, Davis is survived by four daughters: Brangien Davis, Alexandra Davis, Archer Davis and Roxanne Davis.