Samantha Eggar, who has died aged 86, was an adventurous British actress who won a Golden Globe and Cannes Best Actress prize for her performance as a kidnap victim in the movie adaptation of John Fowles’ The Collector (1965); she later committed to cult fare, memorably licking her own newborn clean as a troubled mother in David Cronenberg’s unsettling The Brood (1979).
Pert and redheaded, Eggar could have enjoyed a more conventional career of romantic heroines and secondary sweethearts: one of her breakthrough roles was as the model-turned-actress Delia Mallory, pursued by Dirk Bogarde’s Simon Sparrow in the big Rank hit Doctor in Distress (1963). Instead, she sought out darker material, becoming a begrimed face as the uncertain Seventies went on.
She beat Sarah Miles and Natalie Wood to the role of Miranda Grey, the art student kidnapped by Terence Stamp in The Collector, only to irk veteran director William Wyler. Wyler briefly fired her; Fowles reported “the favourite sport on the Columbia lot is making fun of [Eggar] behind her back”. Eggar, who lost 14 pounds during the shoot, was left wondering whether the stress was a tactic on Wyler’s part: “I guess I was supposed to feel trapped, and I did.”
An Oscar nomination followed the film’s Golden Globes success, though Eggar lost out to Julie Christie’s more flattering work in Darling (1965). Still, she embraced the mainstream: lighting up Cary Grant’s final film Walk, Don’t Run (1966), singing and dancing as Emma Fairfax in Doctor Dolittle (1967) and romancing Richard Harris in The Molly Maguires (1970).
A US relocation yielded high-profile TV work, including CBS’s short-lived King and I spinoff Anna and the King (1972) and a remake of Double Indemnity (1973). There were reported flings with Henry Kissinger and Ed Ruscha, a role as Watson’s wife Mary in the Sherlock Holmes riff The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) and guest slots on Starsky & Hutch, Columbo (both 1977) and Hawaii Five-O (in 1978).
On film, however, she was increasingly drawn towards grislier projects. She confessed to Cronenberg that The Brood, a chilling metastasis of the director’s then-recent divorce, was “the strangest and most repulsive film I’ve ever made” but she told one interviewer that she enjoyed cultivating foetuses on her body: “Those are actually condoms. We had a lot of laughing among all the monstrosity of it.”
More gore followed with the grungy Death Wish knock-off The Exterminator (1980), the Mexican severed-hand opus Demonoid (1981) and the Canadian slasher Curtains (1983) before Eggar refocused on real-life motherhood: “You wonder, are you guilty being away from your kids? Are you guilty because you’ve been told the woman’s place is in the home? Are you guilty because you’ve put ego in front of family? Have you, really? Or is that guilt being projected upon you?”
She was born Victoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese Eggar in Hampstead on March 5, 1938 to Army brigadier Ralph Eggar and his Dutch-Portuguese wife Muriel Palache-Bouma. Educated at St. Mary’s Providence Convent in Woking, she studied fashion at Thanet School of Art; against her parents’ wishes, she began acting in her late teens, eventually enrolling at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art alongside future co-star Stamp.
She debuted on TV in the BBC’s Rob Roy (1961), but stage work as Titania in a Tony Richardson-directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Olivia in Twelfth Night saw Eggar scouted by producer Betty Box to appear in The Wild and the Willing (1962) alongside fellow debutants John Hurt and Ian McShane. She then played the title character’s mistress in Dr. Crippen (1963), opposite Donald Pleasance.
Eggar later returned to TV as a steady income stream; she shook off The Brood with a 1980 episode of The Love Boat in which her character married the Captain. She appeared in the unaired Falcon Crest pilot in 1981 before rejecting a regular role, instead guesting on Murder, She Wrote and Magnum, P.I. (both 1984) and on Star Trek: The Next Generation (in 1990) as Jean-Luc Picard’s sister-in-law.
With her children reaching adulthood, she returned to film, voicing Hera in Disney’s Hercules (1997). She took roles in the superhero flick The Phantom (1996) and sci-fi The Astronaut’s Wife (1999) before playing a scheming mother setting her adopted twins against one another on ABC’s long-running soap All My Children (in 2000).
She made her final onscreen appearance in Fox’s medical drama Mental in 2009, though in 2012 she voiced a mystic whale for the adult animation Metalocalypse, her final credit. Interviewed in 2014, she insisted “I have no regrets. Never had a regret about anything… Mind you, my agent wanted to kill me at times.”
Her 1964 marriage to actor Tom Stern ended in divorce seven years later; she is survived by the couple’s children, producer Nicolas Stern and actress Jenna Stern.
Samantha Eggar, born March 5, 1938, died October 15, 2025.
