Source: Entertainment Weekly

Samantha Eggar, the English actress who starred in such films as The Collector and The Brood, has died.

The actress’ daughter Jenna Stern announced that she died at age 86 on Wednesday. A cause of death was not immediately available.

“My Mama passed Wednesday evening,” Stern wrote on Instagram. “Peacefully and quietly surrounded by family. I was there next to her …holding her hand, telling her how much she was loved. It was beautiful. It was a privilege.”

Eggar’s manager, Christopher Sherman, remembered the actress in an Instagram post.

“Very saddened to hear the news today that longtime friend and client, Samantha Eggar, has passed away,” he wrote. “Sam was the brightest, FUNNIEST, most talented person I have ever known. A beacon of light wherever she went. I will greatly miss our breakfasts, and her wonderful stories, but mostly I will miss her love of the art, her fabulous voice, her compassion for people and animals and her spectacular laugh!! RIP dear friend. Godspeed.”

Born Victoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese Eggar in London in 1939, the actress declined a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to pursue fashion design. She later attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, and began her acting career on the stage in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Landscape With Figures.

The latter play led to her debut film, 1962’s Dr. Crippen, which starred future Halloween icon Donald Pleasence. After a few TV performances in the early 1960s on shows like The Saint and Ghost Squad, Eggar spent the remainder of the decade focusing on film roles.

After appearing in movies like Return From the Ashes and Psyche 59, Eggar’s most acclaimed film role came in 1965’s The Collector. Directed by William Wyler (Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday), the film saw the actress portray an artist who is kidnapped by a disturbed young man (Terence Stamp). Eggar received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (ultimately losing to Julie Christie in Darling), and won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival as well as Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama at the Golden Globes.

The following year, Eggar starred in Walk, Don’t Run, which was Cary Grant’s final film before his retirement. Perhaps her most recognizable ’60s project was 1967’s Doctor Dolittle, in which she played Emma, the traveling companion of Rex Harrison’s titular veterinarian. The film was a notorious box-office bomb, but received eight Academy Award nominations, winning the award for Best Song for “Talk to the Animals.”

In the early 1970s, Eggar appeared alongside Sean Connery and Richard Harris in The Molly Maguires, acted opposite Oliver Reed in The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun, starred with Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner in The Light at the Edge of the World. She reteamed with Brynner in Anna and the King, a TV sitcom that saw the actor reprise his role from The King and I.

The actress starred in the Sherlock Holmes–Sigmund Freud movie The Seven-Per-Cent Solution with Alan Arkin and Robert Duvall in 1977, and reunited with Pleasence in the anthology horror film The Uncanny that same year.

Eggar’s best-known ’70s project was 1979’s The Brood, an early psychological horror film from David Cronenberg (The Fly, Videodrome). The actress portrayed a psychotherapy patient with a mysterious connection to murderous creatures that terrorize a community. She also guested on episodes of Hawaii Five-O, Columbo, The Love Boat, Starsky & Hutch, and Fantasy Island in the late ’70s.

In the 1980s, Eggar returned to the stage in productions of The Seagull and The Lonely Road in the U.K. She appeared in episodes of Magnum, PI and Murder, She Wrote during the same period, as well as horror films like Curtains and Demonoid. She also acted opposite Audrey Hepburn in one of the My Fair Lady star’s final projects, the 1987 TV movie Love Among Thieves.

Eggar appeared in a number of notable projects throughout the 1990s, including an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which she played the sister-in-law of Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard. She provided the voice of Hercules’ Olympian mother Hera in Disney’s Hercules, and reprised the role on seven episodes of the animated film’s TV spinoff of the same name. She also played a supporting role in the Billy Zane–led superhero movie The Phantom.

Eggar’s final film role came in 1999’s The Astronaut’s Wife. The following year, she had a 19-episode stint on All My Children as Charlotte Devane, and played MI6 boss M in the James Bond video game 007: Nightfire. In 2005, she played a recurring role on ABC’s Commander in Chief, and she later guested on Mental and The Nine Lives of Chloe King. The actress’ final screen performance came in 2012 when she voiced Whale in Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse.

The actress’ family and friends also knew her as a steadfast animal lover, and she advocated for conservation organizations like the Cousteau Society and the World Wildlife Fund, as well as other orgs like the Kidney Foundation and the British Olympic Association.

The actress is survived by her daughter, Jenna Stern, and her son, Nicolas Stern.

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