Samantha Eggar, a British actress who deftly hopscotched genres, appearing in comedies, dramas and horror films — and who is perhaps best known for her starring role in a thriller, “The Collector,” in which her portrayal of a young art student held hostage by a psychopath earned her an Oscar nomination — died on Oct. 15 at her home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. She was 86.
Her daughter, Jenna Stern, said the cause was chronic lymphocytic leukemia, with which Ms. Eggar had been diagnosed 22 years ago.
Ms. Eggar had appeared onstage and in a few films before being cast in “The Collector” (1965) as a woman who is stalked and kidnapped by a handsome young butterfly collector (played by Terence Stamp) and locked in the cellar of his English country house. While holding her captive, he is alternately kind and brutal to her.
Ms. Eggar recalled the shooting as a tense experience. Mr. Stamp, a classmate from acting school, never broke character. The director, William Wyler, poured cold water over her “if I didn’t exude precisely what he wanted,” she told The Terror Trap, a horror film website, in 2014. And Mr. Wyler didn’t let her leave the set during the day or eat with the other members of the cast.
“He wanted her in a constant state of terror, and that’s really very difficult to act,” Mr. Stamp recalled to The Magnificent 60s, a film blog, in 2022. Ms. Eggar told The Daily Mirror in 1965 that working on the set of “The Collector” was “the hardest three months of my life,” and that during the shoot she lost about 14 pounds.
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