Eva Marie Saint, one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s golden age of the 1940s and 50s, has died aged 102. Her screen work spanned six decades: Saint made her screen debut opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated thriller North by Northwest, and in one of her last screen appearances played Superman’s adoptive mother Martha Kent in the 2006 superhero film Superman Returns.

A family spokesman said on Tuesday that Saint had died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles.

Born in 1924 in New Jersey to a Quaker family, Saint had an early career as a jobbing radio and TV performer that was chronicled in a 1949 feature in Life magazine which started with the prophetic words: “The name of Eva Marie Saint may someday be a household word” – it followed her struggles to gain a foothold in the entertainment industry. By the early 50s she was making some headway, appearing in 1953 in both the original telecast and the premiere Broadway production of the Horton Foote play The Trip to Bountiful.

Saint told the Santa Barbara Independent that On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan spotted her in The Trip to Bountiful and invited her to audition by improvising a scene with Marlon Brando. Saint said she found the experience difficult, but was offered the role of Edie Doyle, Brando’s love interest, in the hardhitting drama about mob union activities; she would go on to win the Oscar for best supporting actress in 1955.

After this meteoric success, Saint quickly began securing a wide variety of leading roles. She starred opposite Bob Hope in That Certain Feeling, played a woman married to a secret drug addict in the Fred Zinnemann-directed issue picture A Hatful of Rain and co-starred with Elizabeth Taylor in the period western Raintree County. Saint then achieved the highly coveted role opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 spy classic North by Northwest: secret agent Eve Kendall, “a blond who has all the answers”. She said in a TCM interview that she got her career-defining role – partly – by wearing beige and white gloves to a lunch appointment with Hitchcock.

Saint kicked off the 1960s by playing American nurse Kitty Fremont in Exodus, the hit adaptation of Leon Uris’s novel about the creation of the state of Israel, but subsequently eased up on her workload to prioritise her young family. In 1962 she appeared opposite Warren Beatty in All Fall Down as a woman infatuated with Beatty’s drifter, starred as Richard Burton’s wife in The Sandpiper in 1965 alongside Elizabeth Taylor and played a journalist who has an affair with Yves Montand’s race driver in Grand Prix in 1966.

Despite critical acclaim for her role in the 1970 infidelity drama Loving alongside George Segal, Saint’s film parts largely dried up in the 70s and 80s, with the actor instead turning to TV movies and guest appearances. Sporadic film appearances ensued after a “comeback” in the 1986 Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason comedy Nothing in Common; later appearances included as Sam Shepard’s mother in the Wim Wenders-directed western Don’t Come Knocking in 2005, and a year later she was cast in Superman Returns – where she was “reunited” with On the Waterfront star Brando, whose estate gave permission for 1978 footage to be used in the film after his death in 2004. Saint worked more consistently in TV, winning a best supporting actress Emmy award for the 1990 mini-series People Like Us, adapted from Dominick Dunne’s novel. Her final onscreen role was in Winter’s Tale as the sister of the seemingly immortal Colin Farrell.

Saint married Jeffrey Hayden in 1951 and had two children; they remained together until his death in 2016.