Samantha Eggar Courtesy Everett Collection Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Samantha Eggar, the vivacious British actress whose five-year run starting in 1965 included enthralling performances in The Collector, Return From the Ashes, Doctor Dolittle and The Molly Maguires, has died. She was 86. Eggar died Wednesday at her home in Sherman Oaks, her daughter, actress Jenna Stern (House of Cards), told The Hollywood Reporter. She had struggled with illness the past five years but "lived a long, fabulous life," Stern said. After Natalie Wood reportedly turned down the role, Eggar magnificently blended strength and vulnerability to receive a best actress Oscar nomination for her turn as an innocent art student kidnapped and held captive by a lonely psychotic (Terence Stamp) in William Wyler's chilling The Collector (1965). Related Stories TV BBC Gaza Doc Broke Broadcasting Rules by Misleading Audiences, Says U.K. Regulator Ofcom Movies A Chinese Girl in a Welsh Fishing Village Rejects Folklore But Has a Magical Encounter in 'Under the Wave off Little Dragon' Just 25 when making the movie, Eggar remembered just how grueling her star-making turn had been in a 2014 interview for the website The Terror Trap. "Terence was at [the London drama school] Webber Douglas with me. So we knew each other then. But for the sake of the movie, we never spoke throughout the whole film. He really was that character, both off camera and on," Eggar said. "My biggest relationship on set was with William Wyler and [dialogue coach] Kathleen Freeman, a brilliant, brilliant woman who really got me through The Collector, because it was not ... an easy film to make." Wyler ratcheted up the intensity during filming to make the action feel more real. "And if the tension wasn't there - if I didn't exude precisely what he wanted - well, Willie just poured cold water over me," she revealed. "You remember I was tied up by black leather? Well, use your imagination and go from there! What you see onscreen was really taking place on set." In Return From the Ashes (1965), Eggar schemed to murder her stepmother (Ingrid Thulin), a concentration camp survivor. The bouncy romantic comedy Walk, Don't Run (1966) found her sharing a cramped apartment with a British businessman (Cary Grant in his last onscreen role) and an American athlete (Jim Hutton) as the result of a housing crunch caused by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. And Eggar sang and danced alongside Rex Harrison in Doctor Dolittle (1967), the musical fantasy about a guy who can talk to the animals. In 1970 releases, she fought against social injustice with Richard Harris and Sean Connery in Martin Ritt's historical drama The Molly Maguires; took on the offbeat role of an introverted woman duped into committing a robbery by a scheming suitor The Walking Stick; and starred as an unassuming secretary plunged into terror in the thriller The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun. "Samantha Eggar is so fine that she is in herself sufficient justification for the movie," Roger Greenspun wrote in his New York Times review of Lady in the Car. "Beautiful, intelligent and tough enough to be fascinatingly vulnerable, she seems almost to have been typecast into excellent roles: The Collector, The Walking Stick and now The Lady in the Car. "The last may be her best. She makes of it something wonderfully complex, sustained, varied. She marvelously suggests, in what is really a virtuoso performance, those dim and half-felt areas where mysterious fate and the mysteries of personality touch and merge." For television, Eggar starred opposite Yul Brynner in a 1972 CBS adaptation of The King and I and took on the role of the manipulative Phyllis Dietrichson, famously played by Barbara Stanwyck on the big screen, in a 1973 ABC remake of Double Indemnity. She also made a memorable impression as the wife of Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), starring Nicol Williamson as the famed detective. Samantha Eggar in 1967's Doctor Dolittle. Twentieth Century-Fox/Photofest Eggar became a darling of horror fans by appearing in such fare as The Dead Are Alive! (1972), A Name for Evil (1973), The Uncanny (1977) and Curtains (1983). In perhaps her most memorable effort in the genre, she portrayed a deranged mental patient tricked by her doctor into spawning devilish offspring in The Brood (1979), an early David Cronenberg 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,'" she said. "And it wasn't only David's concept that was multilayered, multidimensional. It was also reflected in the writing. As an actor, when