This year is the 60th anniversary of William Wyler’s harrowing psychological thriller The Collector. In a sad coincidence, the film’s two stars each passed away over the last three months. Terence Stamp died in mid-August, and over the weekend it was announced that English actress Samantha Eggar, who earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Stamp’s victim, died at her California home at 86.
A native Londoner, she was born with the impressive and imposing moniker Victoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese Eggar in 1939. After studying fashion for two years, Eggar ignored her parents’ advice and opted to enroll in drama classes in London and pursue an acting career. After appearing in local stage productions she made her TV bow in a 1961 mini-series based on Rob Roy. By this time she had whittled her name down to Samantha Eggar. More “telly” work on such series as Ghost Squad and with Roger Moore on The Saint followed.
Eggar’s first film role was in 1962’s college-set drama The Young and the Willing, which also featured debuts for John Hurt and Ian McShane. The next year she was featured in the true-crime thriller Dr. Crippen and Doctor in Distress, the fifth entry in the “Doctor” comedy series. Director Wyler cast her and Stamp for the leads in The Collector in part, he once said, because the two had studied togther at Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art…and Stamp had apparently been attracted to her. An unsettling tale of a repressed bank teller who abducts a young art student and holds her captive in a remote farmhouse, the film garnered Oscar noms for Eggar, Wyler, and screenwriters Stanley Mann and John Kohn. Eggar also won a Golden Globe, while she and Stamp were awarded at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival.
Samantha’s next film was a complete change of pace. She co-starred with Jim Hutton and (in his final movie) Cary Grant in 1966’s Walk, Don’t Run, a romcom set during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Eggar was animal-fluent vet Rex Harrison’s love interest in 1967’s colorful–and costly–musical Doctor Dolittle. 1970 saw her play a woman physically and emotionally crippled by childhood polio in The Walking Stick and a mining town resident pursued by undercover Pinkerton agent Richard Harris in the 19th-century drama The Molly Maguires.
Eggar co-starred with Yul Brynner in CBS’s short-lived 1972-73 series Anna and the King, in which Brynner reprised his Oscar-winning role from The King and I. She appeared in two made-for-TV films, a 1973 remake of Double Indemnity with Richard Crenna and 1974’s “creepy kids looking for parents” thriller All the Kind Strangers. She would turn up frequently on American TV over the decade, with roles on Columbo, Starsky and Hutch, Hawaii Five-O, and two turns each on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
Starting with the 1972 “giallo” shocker The Dead Are Alive, the classically-trained actress found a niche working in the horror genre. During the next two decades Samantha took part in the sinister goings-on in A Name for Evil (1973), The Uncanny (1977) with Peter Cushing; David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979); Demonoid (1981); and Curtains (1983). She appeared as Mary Morstan Watson, Dr. John Watson’s (Robert Duvall) wife, in the 1976 Sherlock Holmes thriller The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, as well as 1980’s “urban vigilante” actioner The Exterminator.
Her work pace slowed in the ’80s and ’90s, although she still turned up in feature films, among them the 1992 drama Dark Horse, 1996’s comic-strip actioner The Phantom, and as the voice of Hera in Disney’s 1997 animated Hercules. Eggar’s TV work included the 1987 telefilm Love Among Thieves; playing Captain Picard’s (Patrick Stewart) sister-in-law in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation; and guest shots on Magnum, P.I., L.A. Law, Commander in Chief, and a 2000 stint on the ABC daytime drama All My Children. Her final big-screen turn was in 1999’s The Astronaut’s Wife.
Eggar had a son and daughter, Nicolas Stern and Jenna Stern, during her 1964-71 marriage to actor Tom Stern. Her family was with her when she passed away on October 15 at her Southern California home from what was said to be a long illness.