English-born Samantha Eggar, who was Oscar nominated — and received the Golden Globe and the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival — for her performance in thriller “The Collector” before starring in “Doctor Dolittle” and later David Cronenberg’s early horror masterpiece “The Brood,” died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 86.
Her daughter, actress Jenna Stern, posted on Instagram, “My Mama passed Wednesday evening. Peacefully and quietly surrounded by family. I was there next to her …holding her hand, telling her how much she was loved. It was beautiful. It was a privilege.”
She struggled with “a long illness” before her death, her family told TMZ.
Nominated for three Oscars, including best director and adapted screenplay, William Wyler’s chilling 1965 thriller “The Collector,” in which an odd fellow played by Terence Stamp holds Samantha Eggar’s character captive, gave an early boost to her career.
By the next year she starred with Cary Grant in his last picture, Columbia romantic comedy “Walk Don’t Run,” in which Grant’s character plays matchmaker between a U.S. athlete (Jim Hutton) competing at the Tokyo Olympics and the young gal (Eggar) from whom he is renting a room. Variety said, “Fine scripting, direction and performances — including a successful pace change for Samantha Eggar — invest the Columbia release with box office legs both strong and long.”
The success of that film led to her casting in the high-budget “Doctor Dolittle,” starring as Emma Fairfax, love interest to the good doctor as played by Rex Harrison. (“Dolittle,” of course, was remade decades later with Eddie Murphy.)
She was the female lead in Martin Ritt’s 1970 coal miner film “The Molly Maguires,” starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris. Both “Doctor Dolittle” and “The Molly Maguires” offered the actress the opportunity to show off her singing.
In 1970 she also gave a strong performance in the British film “The Walking Stick” as a woman who had polio as a child and has been left psychologically scarred and starred opposite Oliver Reed in Hollywood golden-age director Anatole Litvak’s last film, “The Lady in the Glasses With a Gun.”
Though Eggar did a lot of television and a variety of movies over the years, she returned to the genre that gave the actress her start in David Cronenberg’s 1979 body horror classic “The Brood.” In critic Fernando F. Croce’s ecstatically impressionistic review, he muses, “Above all, Eggar’s bravura matriarch ‘in the middle of a strange adventure,’ her gaze quivering defiantly as she lifts her robes to reveal a literally wandering womb, one of Cronenberg’s most unforgettable visions.”
With her crisp English accent, she began doing voice work in the early ’90s, most notably in Disney’s 1997 animated feature “Hercules,” in which she voiced queen of the gods Hera as part of a cast that also included Tate Donovan, James Woods; she reprised the role on the ABC series spun off from the movie.
Earlier she had voiced Queen Guinevere on the Family Channel animated series “The Legend of Prince Valiant.” She also did voicework for videogames and, most recently, for the Adult Swim series “Metalocalypse.”
She tried series-regular television for the first time in 1972, starring opposite Yul Brynner in a CBS adaptation of “Anna and the King” whose run was brief. After Bernard Girard’s horror film “A Name for Evil” the following year, she focused on a series of TV movies, including a remake of “Double Indemnity” in which she starred in the Barbara Stanwyck role, before returning to the bigscreen in the role of Dr. Watson’s wife in Herbert Ross’ Sherlock Holmes-meets-Sigmund Freud period adventure “The Seven Per-Cent Solution,” based on the novel by Nicholas Meyer.
She appeared in the feline-themed horror film “The Uncanny” in 1977 before appearing in Cronenberg’s “The Brood” in 1979. She was the female lead in the brutal revenge film “The Exterminator” in 1980. The actress was firmly ensconced in the horror genre for a time, appearing in “Demonoid: Messenger of Death” and 1983’s “Curtains” while guesting regularly on TV shows such as “Hawaii Five-O,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat” and “Falcon Crest.”
In 1990 she guested on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” as Captain Picard’s sister-in-law, Marie Picard. On Geena Davis vehicle “Commander in Chief,” which ran in the 2005-06 season, Eggar recurred as Sarah Templeton, wife of Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton, played by Donald Sutherland.
Victoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese Eggar was born in Hampstead, London. She began as an actress working with several Shakespearean companies.
Eggar made her feature debut in 1962’s “Young and Willing,” in which English college students get into sexual and other kinds of misadventures and also counted John Hurt, Ian McShane and Jeremy Brett in its cast. Next was a rather mediocre entry in Rank’s hospital-set “Doctor” franchise starring Dirk Bogarde and the period crime drama “Dr. Crippen,” starring Donald Pleasence as a doctor who may have poisoned his wife; Eggar was third-billed in both of these 1963 films.
More impressive was director Alexander Singer’s “Psyche 59,” a story of hysterical blindness that starred Curd Jurgens, Patricia Neal and Eggar as the hub of the sexual-tension wheel. In addition to “The Collector,” which sparked her career, Eggar made another film that was released in 1965: J. Lee Thompson’s noirish melodrama “Return From the Ashes,” in which she played the lover of a chess-playing rogue portrayed by Maximilian Schell and the daughter of a female doctor (Ingrid Thulin) who survived the Nazi camps. I
Eggar was married to actor Tom Stern from 1964-71.
She is survived by a daughter, actress Jenna Stern, and a son, film producer Nicolas Stern.
