October 17, 2025
Samantha Eggar, the lovely English leading lady who became a star overnight after her performance in The Collector opposite Terence Stamp, has died at 86.
Her daughter confirmed her death in L.A., on October 15, which followed five years of poor health.
Eggar’s work in 1965’s The Collector for Golden Age director William Wyler earned her a Golden Globe Award, the award for Best Actress at Cannes and an Oscar nomination. (Julie Christie won for Darling.) She came to the part when Natalie Wood passed on it.
The film became a classic, and Eggar found herself speaking about it for the rest of her career, including in the above fantastic BTS feature.
She got into film after several first-class performances on the stage, notably as Titania in a mounting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Landscape with Figures (a performance that led to her being scouted for feature work) and as Olivia in Twelfth Night (all 1962).
Her early TV work included Rob Roy (1961), a TV movie of The Princess and the Pea (1961), Ghost Squad (1963) and a winning appearance on Roger Moore’s The Saint (1963).
After her films The Wild and the Willing (1962), Doctor in Distress (1963), Dr. Crippen (1963), Psyche 59 (1964), Return from the Ashes (1965) and her breakthrough via The Collector, she became Cary Grant’s final leading lady in Walk, Don’t Run (1966) with Jim Hutton and starred opposite Rex Harrison in the big-budget musical Doctor Dolittle (1967).
In 1970, she appeared in the Martin Ritt-directed The Molly Maguires with Sean Connery and Richard Harris, a historical drama, and in the same year starred in the thrillers The Walking Stick — opposite lover David Hemmings — and The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun.
In 1971, she acted with Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner in the disappointing Jules Verne adaptation The Light at the Edge of the World. She soon after co-starred with Brynner again on a short-lived The King and I sitcom, Anna and the King (1972).
In the mid-’70s, one of her most high-profile films was The Seven-Per-Cent-Solution (1976), an all-star Sherlock Holmes take featuring Nicol Williamson, Alan Arkin, Vanessa Redgrace, Robert Duvall, Joel Grey and Laurence Olivier.
For more than a decade, Eggar was often a tony addition to a string of well-liked horror movies, among them The Dead Are Alive (1972), A Name for Evil (1973), The Uncanny (1977), Demonoid (1981) and the slasher flick Curtains (1983), none more famous than David Cronenberg’s 1979 classic The Brood., in which she becomes the mother of — quite literally — Satan’s spawn.
She said of the widely loved film:
“I was really fascinated by how David had come upon this idea of the hives growing on me, these children of anger growing on the outside of my stomach. This little army I was bearing. I thought… ‘Goodness, what a mind this is… to conceive such a fantastical thing.’ And it wasn’t only David’s concept that was multilayered, multidimensional. It was also reflected in the writing. As an actor, when you have a sort of Shakespearean way to the writing that is so rich and robust, you revel in it.”
Around this time, Eggar became much more active on TV, guesting on popular shows including Baretta (1976), Columbo (1977), Fantasy Island (1978 & 1979) and The Love Boat (1979 & 1981), and was in the original cast of Falcon Crest (1981), though was replaced by Susan Sullivan when the show went to series.
Perhaps her most ambitious TV work was in a 1973 remake of Double Indemnity.
Though she returned to features occasionally, as in Ragin’ Cajun (1990), The Phantom (1996), The Astronaut’s Wife (1999) and voicing Hera in Hercules (1997) and its video game (1997) and TV spin-off (1998-1999), she mostly worked on TV going forward, maybe most memorably on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1990).
She was a regular voice actor on The Legend of Prince Valiant (1991-1993), had a recurring role on the daytime soap All My Children (2000) and also recurred as the wife of the Speaker of the House (Donald Sutherland) on the Geena Davis series Commander in Chief (2005-2006).
She wound down her career with appearances on the shows Mental (2009), The Nine Lives of Chloe King (2011) and doing voice work for Metalocalypse (2012).
As Metalocalypse aired, Eggar was invited by Cinecon, the Classic Film Festival, to receive a career-achievement award. She was gracious toward fans after a screening of Walk, Don’t Run, speaking eloquently about her time in Hollywood — even though fans did not realize at the time she would not go before the cameras again.
Interestingly, in the Q&A, Eggar was asked if Grant was aware he was making his last film with her. She said no.
In her personal life, Eggar was married to and divorced from Tom Stern. She is survived by their children, Nicolas and Jenna Stern.