British-born Samantha Eggar, who received an Oscar nomination for her performance in the thriller “The Collector,” won a Golden Globe and Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival, and later appeared in “Doctor Dolittle” and later David Cronenberg’s early horror masterpiece “The Brood,” died in Los Angeles on Wednesday. She was 86 years old.
Her daughter, actress Jenna Stern, posted on Instagram: “My mother passed away peacefully and peacefully on Wednesday night surrounded by her family. I was next to her… holding her hand and telling her how much she was loved. It was beautiful. It was an honor.”
She had been battling a “long illness” before her death, her family told TMZ.
In William Wyler’s chilling 1965 thriller The Collector, which was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, a strange man played by Terrence Stamp captivates Samantha Eggar’s character and jumpstarts her career.
By the following year, she co-starred in Cary Grant’s posthumous Columbia romantic comedy Walk, Don’t Run, in which Grant’s character played a matchmaker between an American athlete (Jim Hutton) competing in the Tokyo Olympics and a young gal (Egger) with whom he was renting a room. Variety said, “Excellent writing, direction, and acting, including Samantha Eggar’s change-of-pace success, bankrolled Columbia Pictures’ strong and long-lasting box office success.”
The film’s success led to her being cast in the big-budget Doctor Dolittle, playing Emma Fairfax, the lover of the good doctor played by Rex Harrison. (Of course, “Dolittle” was remade decades later by Eddie Murphy.)
She was the female lead in Martin Ritt’s 1970 coal miner film The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris. “Doctor Dolittle” and “Molly Maguires” both provided actresses with opportunities to perform in songs.
In the 1970 British film The Walking Cane, she played a traumatized woman who contracted polio as a child, and she starred opposite Oliver Reed in Hollywood Golden Age director Anatole Litvak’s posthumous film The Lady with the Spectacles and the Gun.
Egger appeared in many television and various film roles over the years, but returned to the genre that gave her her start in David Cronenberg’s 1979 body horror classic The Brood. In critic Fernando F. Croce’s ecstatic Impressionist review, he muses: “Above all, Egger’s brave matriarch is “in the midst of a strange adventure,” her gaze quivering defiantly as she lifts her robe to reveal a literally wandering womb. This is one of Cronenberg’s most haunting visions.”
With her crisp English accent, she began her voice work in the early ’90s. Most famously, she voiced Hela, Queen of the Gods, in the 1997 Disney animated film Hercules as part of a cast that also included Tate Donovan and James Woods. She reprized the role in the ABC series that spun off from the film.
Previously, she voiced Queen Guinevere on the Family Channel animated series The Legend of Prince Valiant. She also works as a voice actress in video games, most recently in the Adult Swim series “Metalocalypse.”
Her first television series regular role came in 1972, when she starred opposite Yul Brynner in the CBS version of Anna and the King, but her run was short-lived. The following year, after Bernard Girard’s horror film The Name of Evil, she focused on a series of television films, including the remake of The Double Indemnity, in which she starred as Barbara Stanwyck, before returning to the big screen as Dr. Watson’s wife in The Seven Percent Solution, a period drama about Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud, directed by Herbert Ross and based on the novel by Barbara Girard. Nicholas Meyer.
She appeared in the cat-themed horror film The Uncanny in 1977, and then appeared in Cronenberg’s The Brood in 1979. In 1980, she played the female lead in the brutal revenge film The Exterminator. She was firmly entrenched in the horror genre for a time, appearing in films such as Demonoid and 1983’s Curtains, while also making regular guest appearances on television. Shows such as “Hawaii Five-O,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat,” and “Falcon Crest.”
In 1990, she guest-starred on Star Trek: The Next Generation as Marie Picard, Captain Picard’s sister-in-law. In Geena Davis’ vehicle Commander, which ran in the 2005-2006 season, Egger reappeared as Sarah Templeton, the wife of Donald Sutherland’s Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton.
Victoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese Egger was born in Hampstead, London. She began her career as an actress and worked with several Shakespearean companies.
Eggar made his feature debut in 1962’s Young and Willing, a film about British university students embroiled in misadventures of sexual and other kinds, whose cast also included John Hurt, Ian McShane, and Jeremy Brett. Then there was the rather mediocre “Doctor” series, starring Dirk Bogarde, set in a Rank hospital, and “Doctor Crippen,” a historical crime drama starring Donald Pleasence as a doctor who may have poisoned his wife. Egger was the third to appear in both of these 1963 films.
Even more impressive was Alexander Singer’s Psyche 59, a hysterical tale of blindness starring Card Jurgens, Patricia Neal and Egger as the wheels of sexual tension. In addition to The Collector, which launched her career, Egger also starred in another 1965 film, J. Lee Thompson’s noir-like melodrama Return from the Ashes, in which she played the lover of Maximilian Schell’s chess villain and the daughter of a Nazi concentration camp survivor, a doctor (Ingrid Thulin). I
Egger was married to actor Tom Stern from 1964 to 1971.
She has a daughter, Jenna Stern, who is an actress, and a son, Nicholas Stern, who is a film producer.
