Eva Marie Saint, the Voice of Old Katara in The Legend of Korra, Dies at 102. Her Career Began With Two Lines on the Radio
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VoiceEditSuiteClean a session in ninety seconds, not three hours.Eva Marie Saint, who won an Oscar for her very first film and, almost six decades later, gave old Katara her voice in Nickelodeon’s The Legend of Korra, has died at 102. Hollywood is remembering the Hitchcock heroine. Avatar fans are remembering the healer who taught Korra to walk again.
Saint died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. Her family representative, Jeff Sanderson, confirmed the news, and Irish broadcaster RTÉ reported that she died of natural causes, surrounded by family and loved ones. She is survived by her son Darrell and her daughter Laurette. Her husband of 65 years, the director Jeffrey Hayden, died in 2016.
The obituaries lead with On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, and they should. But for anyone under 30, the voice they know is a soft, steady grandmother at the South Pole, and that is where a lot of the grief is landing this week.
Avatar fans heard the news on their feeds first
Within hours of the announcement, animation accounts on X were posting it next to a picture of Katara. One of the biggest came from ToonHive, which set a photo of Saint beside old Katara herself. By Thursday the post had been seen more than 750,000 times and liked about 68,000 times.
Eva Marie Saint, the elderly voice of Katara in ‘Avatar: The Legend of Korra,’ has sadly passed away at the age of 102.
Most of the replies under it were gentle, and a lot of them were about the number. “She lived a good life,” wrote Felix Espinal. Jon Carlos Hardwick added: “R.I.P 102 is a long full life glad she was able to make it to that age. Most people don’t.”
On Threads, the fan account avatarnetflixtv_ put it more plainly. “Hollywood has lost one of its greats,” it wrote. “Avatar fans have lost the voice of a beloved elder.” Fan wikis and tribute pages have spent the week filling up with the same goodbye.
The healer who taught Korra to walk again
When The Legend of Korra arrived in 2012, the show’s creators had a problem nobody envies: how do you age up a character millions of kids grew up with? Mae Whitman had voiced the young Katara in Avatar: The Last Airbender. For the 85 year old version, Aang’s widow and the most famous healer in the world, they went to a Hollywood legend who was 87 herself.
Saint’s Katara isn’t in every episode. She doesn’t need to be. She turns up at the turning points, gives Korra the permission or the push she needs, and leaves. The most remembered of those moments comes in Book Four, when Katara helps a poisoned, broken Korra learn to stand again.
Image: Avatar Legends / Nickelodeon
The people making the show knew what they had. Co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino posted a photo from a session with Saint, Janet Varney (Korra) and Alex McKenna (Korra’s mother, Senna), and wrote that “Recording with Eva Marie Saint (the voice of Katara in Legend of Korra) is always a treat.” He called her “a Hollywood legend from films like North by Northwest and Exodus.”
What she brought was restraint. Saint played Katara at 85 as someone with nothing left to prove. She speaks slowly, she smiles with her voice, and she never pushes. In a series full of shouting benders, that quiet made her the warmest voice in the room. Episode by episode, here’s where she shows up.
Before the films, there was the radio
The voice came first in her career, too. She had planned to be a third grade teacher like her mother, until she won the lead in a play at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. After college she spent a year hunting for acting work in Manhattan and getting nowhere. According to the Associated Press, the break that ended that year was a two line role as a telephone operator in a radio drama. From there she worked steadily in soap operas and evening dramas, then moved into live television just as it exploded in the early 1950s.
She was shy, and she credited the Actors Studio with getting her past it. “Lee Strasberg, when he got to know me a little bit, gave me a scene to do where I had to cry in front of my peers,” she told The Santa Barbara Independent in 2009. “I finally did the scene, and I cried, and my peers were crying with me. It was just an incredible moment for me.”
Anyone who has ever booked a job from a two line read will recognise the next part. She auditioned for Elia Kazan by improvising a scene with Marlon Brando, and the improvisation is what got her cast. Booth actors call that making a choice. She made one that changed her life.
An Oscar, a baby and a husband who read scripts
She remembered that audition for the Los Angeles Times in 2001. “All I know is that Marlon got in the door and turned on the music. We started dancing. He flicked my skirt,” she said, as quoted in the Associated Press obituary. On the Waterfront won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in March 1955, and she was heavily pregnant when Frank Sinatra handed it to her. Her speech was one line: “I think I may have the baby right here.” Her son Darrell was born two days later.
Image: Oscars / Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Then she did something Hollywood rarely saw. She turned down studio contracts and big roles to stay home with her son, and she made only seven films in her first decade. She said no to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Rainmaker. She nearly said no to Hitchcock.
Her husband talked her into North by Northwest. “I vividly remember him saying, ‘Honey, I think you should find a quiet spot. I’ll take care of the children and I want you to really think about this and reread this script,'” she told Vanity Fair in 2014. “He was so right. And that’s what husbands are for.” Later decades brought Moonlighting, an Emmy for the 1990 miniseries People Like Us, Superman Returns and Winter’s Tale.
Still working with her voice in her late 90s
Her last television role was Katara. The Book Four episode “Korra Alone,” which aired on October 10, 2014, is listed as her final television performance, when she was 90. She didn’t stop there, though. In 2021, in her late 90s, she played Marisa Tomei’s aunt in “The Bus Ride,” a short audio play for The Pack Podcast. A career that started with two lines on the radio ended, like it began, with nothing but her voice.
Image: Avatar Legends / Nickelodeon
For voice actors, that arc is worth sitting with. An Oscar winner said yes to a cartoon grandmother at 87 and to an audio play in her late 90s, and the cartoon grandmother is how a whole generation will remember her. Some of those fans won’t watch On the Waterfront for years. They’ll know her voice the moment they do.
Plenty of people assumed a name like Eva Marie Saint had to be invented. It wasn’t. She was born with it on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, and she kept it, and her own way of doing things, for 102 years.
Sources: Associated Press obituary via ABC News; RTÉ; ToonHive and replies on X; avatarnetflixtv_ on Threads; Michael Dante DiMartino on Tumblr; Wikipedia episode and character records for The Legend of Korra. Images: Warner Bros. Entertainment (North by Northwest trailer), Oscars / Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Avatar Legends (Nickelodeon).
Lee este artículo en español: Muere Eva Marie Saint, la voz de Katara anciana en La leyenda de Korra, a los 102 años. Su carrera empezó con dos líneas en la radio
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