\n<\/p>\n
\n\tSamantha Eggar, the vivacious British actress whose five-year run starting in 1965 included enthralling performances in\u00a0The Collector<\/em>,\u00a0Return From the Ashes<\/em>,\u00a0Doctor Dolittle<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Molly Maguires<\/em>, has died. She was 86.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tEggar died Wednesday at her home in Sherman Oaks, her daughter, actress Jenna Stern (House of Cards<\/em>), told The Hollywood Reporter<\/em>. She had struggled with illness the past five years but \u201clived a long, fabulous life,\u201d Stern said.<\/p>\n \n\tAfter 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\u2019s chilling The Collector <\/em>(1965).<\/p>\n \n\tJust 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cTerence 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,\u201d Eggar said. \u201cMy biggest relationship on set was with William Wyler and [dialogue coach] Kathleen Freeman, a brilliant, brilliant woman who really got me through\u00a0The Collector<\/em>, because it was not \u2026 an easy film to make.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWyler ratcheted up the intensity during filming to make the action feel more real. \u201cAnd if the tension wasn\u2019t there \u2014 if I didn\u2019t exude precisely what he wanted \u2014 well, Willie just poured cold water over me,\u201d she revealed. \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn\u00a0Return From the Ashes<\/em>\u00a0(1965), Eggar schemed to murder her stepmother (Ingrid Thulin), a concentration camp survivor. The bouncy romantic comedy\u00a0Walk, Don\u2019t Run<\/em>\u00a0(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\u00a0Doctor Dolittle<\/em>\u00a0(1967), the musical fantasy about a guy who can talk to the animals.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn 1970 releases, she fought against social injustice with Richard Harris and Sean Connery in Martin Ritt\u2019s historical drama\u00a0The Molly Maguires;<\/em>\u00a0took on the offbeat role of an introverted woman duped into committing a robbery by a scheming suitor\u00a0The Walking Stick<\/em>; and starred as an unassuming secretary plunged into terror in the thriller\u00a0The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cSamantha Eggar is so fine that she is in herself sufficient justification for the movie,\u201d Roger Greenspun wrote in his\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0review of\u00a0Lady in the Car<\/em>. \u201cBeautiful, intelligent and tough enough to be fascinatingly vulnerable, she seems almost to have been typecast into excellent roles:\u00a0The Collector<\/em>,\u00a0The Walking Stick<\/em>\u00a0and now\u00a0The Lady in the Car<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFor television, Eggar starred opposite Yul Brynner in a 1972 CBS adaptation of\u00a0The King and I<\/em>\u00a0and took on the role of the manipulative Phyllis Dietrichson, famously played by Barbara Stanwyck on the big screen, in a 1973 ABC remake of\u00a0Double Indemnity<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tShe also made a memorable impression as the wife of Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) in\u00a0The Seven-Per-Cent Solution\u00a0<\/em>(1976), starring Nicol Williamson as the famed detective.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n Samantha Eggar in 1967\u2019s Doctor Dolittle.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tTwentieth Century-Fox\/Photofest<\/p>\n \n\tEggar became a darling of horror fans by appearing in such fare as\u00a0The Dead Are Alive!<\/em>\u00a0(1972),\u00a0A Name for Evil\u00a0<\/em>(1973),\u00a0The Uncanny<\/em>\u00a0(1977) and\u00a0Curtains<\/em>\u00a0(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\u00a0The Brood<\/em>\u00a0(1979), an early David Cronenberg film.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI 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 \u2026 \u2018Goodness, what a mind this is \u2026 to conceive such a fantastical thing,’\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it wasn\u2019t only David\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tCronenberg once said The Brood<\/em> was his most autobiographical film, as he was locked in a bitter custody battle with his first wife at the time.<\/p>\n \n\tVictoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese\u00a0Eggar was born on March 5, 1939, in Hampstead, England, and raised in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Her father, Ralph, was a brigadier general\u00a0in the British Army, and her mother, Muriel, served as an ambulance driver during World War II.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tDuring the war, she lived in the countryside with family friends and spent 12 years in a convent, where exposure to plays, concerts and poetry instilled in her a love of the arts (it\u2019s also where she adopted the name Samantha at age 16). As she once quipped, she seemed \u201cimmediately destined to be an actor or a nun.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tShe received a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but her mother, horrified at the thought of her daughter becoming an actor, would not let her go. She was, however, allowed to enter art school to study painting and drawing.<\/p>\n \n\tAfter graduation, Eggar was hired as a fashion artist. \u201cThat\u2019s not a fashion designer, because I was hopeless at math. I would have had the hems sort of at the wrong length, probably,\u201d she said. \u201c[Fashion artists] go to the shows and they do the drawings, and those were the drawings you\u2019d see in the ads in\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>. That\u2019s the job I got at [Norman] Hartnell\u2019s, who was the queen\u2019s designer.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tOne day, Eggar\u2019s cousin insisted she get in his car, and the next thing she knew, she was at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts. \u201cHe said, \u2018Here\u2019s the door \u2026 get in there. Go and do it,’\u201d she recalled. \u201c\u2018Do those bits you\u2019ve done. You\u2019ve got your own version of Ophelia. And you\u2019ve got some poems you\u2019ve learned.\u2019 So I did. And the next thing I know, I\u2019m accepted.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBefore she could complete the two-year program at Webber Douglas, she was offered a role in Landscape With Figures<\/em>, photographer Cecil Beaton\u2019s play about English painter Thomas Gainsborough that opened at the Theatre Royal Brighton in 1959. Classical productions of Chekhov and Shakespeare followed, most notably a 1962 staging of\u00a0A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>\u00a0with Albert Finney, David Warner and Lynn Redgrave at the Royal Court Theatre.<\/p>\n \n\tProducer Betty E. Box spotted Eggar and offered her a role as a slutty college coed in\u00a0Young and Willing<\/em>\u00a0(1962). She then co-starred with Dirk Bogarde in the comedy\u00a0Doctor in Distress<\/em>\u00a0(1963), with Donald Pleasence in the crime drama\u00a0Dr. Crippen<\/em>\u00a0(1963) and with Patricia Neal in the lustful thriller\u00a0Psyche 59<\/em>\u00a0(1964).<\/p>\n \n\tShe captured the best actress award at Cannes and then a Golden Globe for\u00a0The Collector\u00a0<\/em>but\u00a0<\/em>lost out in the best actress race at the 1966 Oscars to Julie Christie of\u00a0Darling<\/em>. (Also nominated that year: Julie Andrews of\u00a0The Sound of Music<\/em>, Simone Signoret of\u00a0Ship of Fools<\/em>\u00a0and Elizabeth Hartman of\u00a0A Patch of Blue<\/em>.)<\/p>\n \n\tShe moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and worked in other films\u00a0including\u00a0Ragin\u2019 Cajun<\/em> (1990), Dark Horse<\/em> (1992),\u00a0Inevitable Grace<\/em> (1994), The Phantom<\/em> (1996) and\u00a0The Astronaut\u2019s Wife<\/em>\u00a0(1999).<\/p>\n \n\tShe also appeared as Captain Picard\u2019s (Patrick Stewart) sister-in-law on\u00a0Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/em>, as the spy Charlotte Devane on\u00a0All My Children<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 moving to New York City for several months and learning 20 pages of dialogue nightly \u2014 and as the\u00a0wife of the Speaker of the House\u00a0(Donald Sutherland) on\u00a0Commander in Chief<\/em>, starring Geena Davis as the U.S. president.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd Eggar did extensive voiceover work; she played of Hera in\u00a0Hercules<\/em>\u00a0in 1987 and could be heard as M on James Bond video games (she was a longtime member of the California Artists Radio Theatre).\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tShe was married to American actor Tom Stern from 1964 until their 1971 divorce. In addition to her daughter, survivors include her son, producer Nicolas Stern (Friends With Benefits<\/em>,\u00a0Creed<\/em>,\u00a0Snowfall<\/em>); daughter-in-law Mindy; son-in-law Brennan; grandchildren Charlie, Isabel and Calla; and sisters Margaret, Toni and Vivien.<\/p>\n \n\tDonations in her memory can be made to The Cousteau Society, the World Wildlife Fund, the ALS Association, The Kidney Foundation and\/or the British Olympic Association.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Samantha Eggar, the vivacious British actress whose five-year run starting in 1965 included enthralling performances in\u00a0The Collector,\u00a0Return From the Ashes,\u00a0Doctor Dolittle\u00a0and\u00a0The Molly Maguires, has died. She was 86.\u00a0 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[4612,6908,3952,17040],"class_list":{"0":"post-28716","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-actress","9":"tag-collector","10":"tag-doctor","11":"tag-dolittle"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28716\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}