Samantha Eggar was cast repeatedly for intensity and vulnerability in thrillers and psychological dramas, and the mainstream mostly put her in a bonnet. The two performances that last were for William Wyler in The Collector (1965) and David Cronenberg in The Brood (1979).
Fi1m perspective
In Doctor Dolittle (1967) Samantha Eggar spends a great deal of time glaring at Rex Harrison from under a bonnet. The script gives Emma Fairfax two settings, scold and convert, and nothing in between, so Eggar fills the gap with the glare, and it is the one thing she is allowed that looks like a decision. Ray Aghayan dresses her in crinolines the colour of boiled sweets.
That was the mainstream getting hold of her, and it never worked out what to do with her. She had come up through Shakespearean theatre in the late 1950s and early 1960s, made her film debut in 1962, and broke through in The Collector (1965), playing Miranda Grey, an art student kidnapped and kept, for William Wyler. Critics have always noticed the same thing in that performance: strength and vulnerability in the same body. It made her name. Then came the large, well-behaved pictures, Doctor Dolittle and The Molly Maguires (1970), before she moved to the United States and Canada in the early 1970s.
The other performance people still talk about is Nola Carveth in David Cronenberg's The Brood (1979). We have not reviewed it and will not judge it at length; it is enough to say that Cronenberg, like Wyler, cast her for intensity and that horror kept finding work for her when respectable drama had stopped. The pattern across the career is plain. Put her in a thriller or a psychological drama and directors reached for her; put her in a musical and she was scenery. Off screen she carried a reputation for a cold, defensive manner, which some put down to what The Collector had cost her. On screen, that coolness was the instrument.
We felt for her in Doctor Dolittle. Somewhere on the voyage, with another Leslie Bricusse song stopping the story to explain a feeling we had already understood, it struck us that an actor whose trade was watchfulness had been hired to be looked at, and given nothing to watch. We were bored, and then we were irritated at being bored by something on which so much care had been spent. The later decades were television guest roles, occasional films until the early 2010s, and voice work, including Hera in Hercules (1997). Asked about it all in 2014, she said, "I have no regrets. Never had a regret about anything… Mind you, my agent wanted to kill me at times." If you want to see what the fuss was about, it is The Collector. Come to Doctor Dolittle for the animals, and watch what she manages with the glare.
Biography
Samantha Eggar was an English actress. She trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and began her career in Shakespearean theatre before making her film debut in The Wild and the Willing (1962).
Eggar played Emma Fairfax in Doctor Dolittle (1967). She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her performance in The Collector (1965), for which she also won a Golden Globe and the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress. Her other film roles include The Molly Maguires (1970) and The Brood (1979). She provided the voice of Hera in Hercules (1997) and appeared in television series including Columbo, Murder, She Wrote and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Eggar was born Victoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese Eggar on 5 March 1939 in Hampstead, London, and died on 15 October 2025 in Sherman Oaks, California.
