SAMANTHA EGGAR
(5 March 1939 – 15 October 2025)
The English actress Samantha Eggar, who has died aged 86 after a long illness, was very lucky early on in her career when she was cast by director William Wyler to be in The Collector, a psychological drama adapted from the novel by John Fowles. It was 1965 and it was Eggar’s sixth film. The plot was about a reclusive butterfly collector, played by the late Terence Stamp, who kidnaps art student Miranda Grey (Eggar) and keeps her prisoner in a basement, not intending to harm her but just because he wants to collect human beings. Eggar found the filming quite nerve-wracking because in order to get a reaction of fear from the girl, Wyler would throw water over her. And to increase the tension, Eggar and Stamp rarely spoke to each other between scenes, even though they had both been at the same drama school together. The film was a success and it won Eggar a Golden Globe, the best actress award at Cannes, a Spanish San Jordi award and a best actress Oscar nomination.
Samantha Eggar was born Victoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese Eggar to Ralph Eggar, a British army brigadier, and his wife Muriel Olga Palache-Bourma who was of Dutch and Portuguese descent. The family moved from Hampstead in north-west London to Bledlow in Buckinghamshire where their daughter spent her childhood. She went to a convent school where she felt she would like to be an actress even against her parents’ wishes. She won a scholarship to Rada but turned it down to study fashion at the Thanet School of Art. However, after two years she enrolled at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Her acting career first saw her in several Shakespeare productions which in 1962 led to her getting the part of Ethel Le Neve in the film Dr Crippen with Donald Pleasence. The same year saw her in The Wild and the Willing, a university-set romantic drama which also heralded the film debuts of John Hurt and Ian McShane. Then she starred opposite Cary Grant in Charles Walters’ romantic comedy Walk, Don’t Run and played Emma Fairfax in Richard Fleischer’s Doctor Dolittle musical alongside Rex Harrison, Richard Attenborough and Anthony Newley, a monumental flop.
Eggar was good enough to continue working with major stars including Sean Connery and Richard Harris in Martin Ritt’s historical drama The Molly Maguires, with Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner in the Jules Verne adventure The Light at the Edge of the World, and with David Hemmings, with whom she had a relationship, in the crime drama The Walking Stick, from Winston Graham’s novel. Hemmings later directed her in Dark Horse, a story by Tab Hunter about a handicapped girl and her steed. She went on to make some horror films – The Dead Are Alive, A Name for Evil, The Uncanny, Demonoid and David Cronenberg’s The Brood. She was Mary Watson in Herbert Ross’s ‘new’ Sherlock Holmes film The Seven Per Cent Solution starring Nicol Williamson with Alan Arkin as Freud, Laurence Olivier as Moriarty, Vanessa Redgrave as Lola Devereaux and Robert Duvall as Dr Watson. Her last films included the superhero adventure The Phantom, the voiceover for Hera in Disney’s Hercules and Rand Ravich’s science fiction thriller The Astronaut’s Wife (1999), with Johnny Depp and Charlize Theron, Eggar’s last movie role.
She also appeared on television from time to time, in The Saint, Anna and the King, a made-for-TV version of Double Indemnity, Columbo, Starsky and Hutch, Fantasy Island, Hawaii Five-O, Murder, She Wrote, Star Trek: The Next Generation and twenty episodes of All My Children, a topical soap opera that dealt with social issues. Samantha Eggar was married to the actor Tom Stern and they had two children, the film producer Nicolas Stern, and the actress Jenna Stern. They divorced in 1971.
MICHAEL DARVELL