Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress who starred in Hollywood classics such as On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, has died aged 102.

Saint won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her movie debut in director Elia Kazan's 1954 crime drama On the Waterfront, playing Edie Doyle, the love interest of Marlon Brando's conflicted boxer-turned-docker.

Five years later, she portrayed femme fatale Eve Kendall, dangerously seducing Cary Grant's entangled advertising executive in Alfred Hitchcock's spy thriller, North by Northwest.

She died on Tuesday of natural causes, surrounded by family and loved ones at her home in Los Angeles, family representative Jeff Sanderson confirmed.

Until her death, Saint was the oldest surviving Oscar winner and one of the last remaining stars of Hollywood's golden age.

Started in live television in the late 1940s, she also won an Emmy in 1990 for her role as a rich widow in the acclaimed TV miniseries People Like Us.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1924, Saint had originally intended to become a teacher before developing a passion for theatre.

She trained in New York at the Herbert Berghof Studio and then the Actors Studio – the home of method acting – co-founded by Kazan.

Saint burst on to the Hollywood scene with her performance in Kazan's classic, On the Waterfront.

Brando was known as an intense method actor and Saint admitted to having found him "adorable" but "a little frightening".

"I felt that he could see right through me," she told Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in a 2013 interview.

She was considered a surprise choice, though, to play one of "Hitchcock's blondes", as they were known at the time, in his masterpiece North by Northwest.

Her co-star Grant was known for being very demanding of his leading ladies.

"He worked with me from the outside in," said Saint.

"My hair, my makeup, my shoes, my jewellery, my purse, my gloves, everything. And just from creating that exterior for me, he gave me the sense of a spy lady."

Saint also starred opposite Paul Newman in Otto Preminger's Exodus in 1960, and she was Warren Beatty's love interest in John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down.

But she then stepped away from the limelight to raise a family with director Jeffrey Hayden.

Half a century later, Saint – by then in her early 80s – made a big screen comeback as Superman's adoptive mother in the 2006 blockbuster Superman Returns.

And she later had parts in the supernatural fantasy Winter's Tale, alongside Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe, and the 2019 nun drama Mariette in Ecstasy.

Saint, who has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her movie and TV work, said her longevity in acting had given her work extra depth.

"The longer you live, the smarter you get, because you've been around, you've seen things," she told TCM.

"You've gone through different emotional experiences in your own life, and hopefully, you understand things better.

"And that makes you a better actress."

Saint's marriage to Hayden lasted for 65 years, until his death in 2016, and she is survived by their two children.