Samantha Eggar, Oscar-Nominated Actress in ‘The Collector,’ Dies at 86

Samantha Eggar, the vivacious British actress whose five-year run starting in 1965 included enthralling performances in The Collector, Return From the Ashes, Doctor Dolittle and The Molly Maguires, has died. She was 86.

Eggar died Wednesday at her home in Sherman Oaks, her daughter, actress Jenna Stern (House of Cards), told The Hollywood Reporter. She had struggled with illness the past five years but “lived a long, fabulous life,” Stern said.

After Natalie Wood reportedly turned down the role, Eggar magnificently blended strength and vulnerability to receive a best actress Oscar nomination for her turn as an innocent art student kidnapped and held captive by a lonely psychotic (Terence Stamp) in William Wyler’s chilling The Collector (1965).

Just 25 when making the movie, Eggar remembered just how grueling her star-making turn had been in a 2014 interview for the website The Terror Trap.

“Terence was at [the London drama school] Webber Douglas with me. So we knew each other then. But for the sake of the movie, we never spoke throughout the whole film. He really was that character, both off camera and on,” Eggar said. “My biggest relationship on set was with William Wyler and [dialogue coach] Kathleen Freeman, a brilliant, brilliant woman who really got me through The Collector, because it was not … an easy film to make.”

Wyler ratcheted up the intensity during filming to make the action feel more real. “And if the tension wasn’t there — if I didn’t exude precisely what he wanted — well, Willie just poured cold water over me,” she revealed. “You remember I was tied up by black leather? Well, use your imagination and go from there! What you see onscreen was really taking place on set.”

In Return From the Ashes (1965), Eggar schemed to murder her stepmother (Ingrid Thulin), a concentration camp survivor. The bouncy romantic comedy Walk, Don’t Run (1966) found her sharing a cramped apartment with a British businessman (Cary Grant in his last onscreen role) and an American athlete (Jim Hutton) as the result of a housing crunch caused by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. And Eggar sang and danced alongside Rex Harrison in Doctor Dolittle (1967), the musical fantasy about a guy who can talk to the animals.

In 1970 releases, she fought against social injustice with Richard Harris and Sean Connery in Martin Ritt’s historical drama The Molly Maguires; took on the offbeat role of an introverted woman duped into committing a robbery by a scheming suitor The Walking Stick; and starred as an unassuming secretary plunged into terror in the thriller The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun.

“Samantha Eggar is so fine that she is in herself sufficient justification for the movie,” Roger Greenspun wrote in his New York Times review of Lady in the Car. “Beautiful, intelligent and tough enough to be fascinatingly vulnerable, she seems almost to have been typecast into excellent roles: The Collector, The Walking Stick and now The Lady in the Car.

“The last may be her best. She makes of it something wonderfully complex, sustained, varied. She marvelously suggests, in what is really a virtuoso performance, those dim and half-felt areas where mysterious fate and the mysteries of personality touch and merge.”

For television, Eggar starred opposite Yul Brynner in a 1972 CBS adaptation of The King and I and took on the role of the manipulative Phyllis Dietrichson, famously played by Barbara Stanwyck on the big screen, in a 1973 ABC remake of Double Indemnity.

She also made a memorable impression as the wife of Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), starring Nicol Williamson as the famed detective.

Eggar became a darling of horror fans by appearing in such fare as The Dead Are Alive! (1972), A Name for Evil (1973), The Uncanny (1977) and Curtains (1983). In perhaps her most memorable effort in the genre, she portrayed a deranged mental patient tricked by her doctor into spawning devilish offspring in The Brood (1979), an early David Cronenberg film.

“I was really fascinated by how David had come upon this idea of the hives growing on me, these children of anger growing on the outside of my stomach. This little army I was bearing. I thought … ‘Goodness, what a mind this is … to conceive such a fantastical thing,'” she said. “And it wasn’t only David’s concept that was multilayered, multidimensional. It was also reflected in the writing. As an actor, when you have a sort of Shakespearean way to the writing that is so rich and robust, you revel in it.”

Cronenberg once said The Brood was his most autobiographical film, as he was locked in a bitter custody battle with his first wife at the time.

Victoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese Eggar was born on March 5, 1939, in Hampstead, England, and raised in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Her father, Ralph, was a brigadier general in the British Army, and her mother, Muriel, served as an ambulance driver during World War II.

During the war, she lived in the countryside with family friends and spent 12 years in a convent, where exposure to plays, concerts and poetry instilled in her a love of the arts (it’s also where she adopted the name Samantha at age 16). As she once quipped, she seemed “immediately destined to be an actor or a nun.”

She received a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but her mother, horrified at the thought of her daughter becoming an actor, would not let her go. She was, however, allowed to enter art school to study painting and drawing.

After graduation, Eggar was hired as a fashion artist. “That’s not a fashion designer, because I was hopeless at math. I would have had the hems sort of at the wrong length, probably,” she said. “[Fashion artists] go to the shows and they do the drawings, and those were the drawings you’d see in the ads in The New York Times. That’s the job I got at [Norman] Hartnell’s, who was the queen’s designer.”

One day, Eggar’s cousin insisted she get in his car, and the next thing she knew, she was at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts. “He said, ‘Here’s the door … get in there. Go and do it,'” she recalled. “‘Do those bits you’ve done. You’ve got your own version of Ophelia. And you’ve got some poems you’ve learned.’ So I did. And the next thing I know, I’m accepted.”

Before she could complete the two-year program at Webber Douglas, she was offered a role in Landscape With Figures, photographer Cecil Beaton’s play about English painter Thomas Gainsborough that opened at the Theatre Royal Brighton in 1959. Classical productions of Chekhov and Shakespeare followed, most notably a 1962 staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Albert Finney, David Warner and Lynn Redgrave at the Royal Court Theatre.

Producer Betty E. Box spotted Eggar and offered her a role as a slutty college coed in Young and Willing (1962). She then co-starred with Dirk Bogarde in the comedy Doctor in Distress (1963), with Donald Pleasence in the crime drama Dr. Crippen (1963) and with Patricia Neal in the lustful thriller Psyche 59 (1964).

She captured the best actress award at Cannes and then a Golden Globe for The Collector but lost out in the best actress race at the 1966 Oscars to Julie Christie of Darling. (Also nominated that year: Julie Andrews of The Sound of Music, Simone Signoret of Ship of Fools and Elizabeth Hartman of A Patch of Blue.)

She moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and worked in other films including Ragin’ Cajun (1990), Dark Horse (1992), Inevitable Grace (1994), The Phantom (1996) and The Astronaut’s Wife (1999).

She also appeared as Captain Picard’s (Patrick Stewart) sister-in-law on Star Trek: The Next Generation, as the spy Charlotte Devane on All My Children — she moved to New York City for several months and learned 20 pages of dialogue nightly — and as the wife of the Speaker of the House (Donald Sutherland) on Commander in Chief, starring Geena Davis as the U.S. president.

And Eggar did extensive voiceover work; she played Hera in Hercules in 1987 and could be heard as M in James Bond video games (she was a longtime member of the California Artists Radio Theatre).

Eggar was active as a lector/lay minister at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills and at Saint Francis de Sales Parish in Sherman Oaks, leading weekly meditations until the pandemic.

And “to know Sam was to understand her love for animals, all creatures great and small,” her family said. “Her beloved pups ranged from Great Danes to Dalmatians, street rescues to her adored bulldogs, their leashes still hanging in memoriam, long after their passing.”

Eggar was married to American actor Tom Stern from 1964 until their 1971 divorce. In addition to her daughter, survivors include her son, producer Nicolas Stern (Friends With Benefits, Creed, Snowfall); daughter-in-law Mindy; son-in-law Brennan; grandchildren Charlie, Isabel and Calla; and sisters Margaret, Toni and Vivien.

I remember Benny Hill’s parody of The Collector.

The Stamp Collector
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOyZZQwPRjY

She was stunningly beautiful.

She was dynamite as the materialistic wife in The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case, a memorable episode of "Columbo." I also remember her from Walk Don't Run.

I never saw The Collector.

Saw her in “The Brood”. As soon as I saw her, I was struck by how achingly attractive she was. By the end, I couldn’t stand even facing in her general direction with my eyes closed. That, in my mind, is what you call true talent.

Someone who was present on the set of one of her early movies said that everyone who looked at her fell in love with her. I wish I could remember where I read that.

Something similar was said of Vivien Leigh. When David Selznick for the first time walked her around the sound stage where Gone With The Wind was to be filmed, it was said that all the hammering and sawing and shop talk of the craftspeople gradually went silent.

That's the thing about beauty. It is the power to create emotion in total strangers.

Stephen Sondheim wrote these lines:

Pretty is what changes
What the mind arranges
is what is beautiful.

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