Samantha Eggar, Oscar-Nominated Star of ‘The Collector,’ Dies at 86

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.

Bosley Crowther, in his review in The New York Times, praised Ms. Eggar for deftly demonstrating a range of emotions. “The feelings of fear, indignation, anxiety, puzzlement, shock and eventually dismal melancholy and terrifying despair,” he wrote, “possess her young and vital person with tempestuous clarity.”

Although she lost the Oscar to Julie Christie, another British actress, for “Darling,” Ms. Eggar was named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival.

Two years later, in the musical “Doctor Dolittle” — starring Rex Harrison as an eccentric veterinarian who converses with animals — Ms. Eggar played his cook on an ocean voyage to find the Great Pink Sea Snail.

Her other films of that period included “Walk, Don’t Run” (1966), a romantic comedy set in Tokyo during the 1964 Summer Olympics in which her character sublets her cramped apartment to a businessman, played by Cary Grant, in his final movie role, and an American athlete, played by Jim Hutton.

In “The Molly Maguires” (1970), set in 19th-century Pennsylvania, Ms. Eggar starred as the daughter of an injured coal miner opposite Sean Connery, as a rabble-rousing miner who fights for better conditions and Richard Harris, as a company spy who rents a room from her and falls in love with him.

Bernard Drew, the film critic of the Gannett newspaper chain, wrote that Ms. Eggar “radiates beauty and intelligence as the pious girl beset by conflicts.”

Her beauty was on display in a memorable commercial for the RCA ColorTrak television in 1976.

“My eyes are green, my hair is auburn and my dress is vivid red,” she said, looking directly at the camera. “RCA wanted me to tell you the right colors because getting the color right is what their exclusive ColorTrak system is all about.”

To keep Samantha safe during the Blitz, her parents sent her to live with friends in the countryside in Bledlow, Buckinghamshire. She later enrolled at St. Mary’s Providence Convent in Surrey, where she stayed for 11 years and became interested in acting. But her mother thought acting was “unladylike,” she later told The Los Angeles Times, and suggested that she study art. That led her to focus on fashion design for two years at the Thanet School of Art in Kent.

She shifted to acting after she learned of an interview opportunity at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art (now the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) in London. She was accepted and graduated in 1962.

While performing onstage, including as Titania in a production Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in London, Ms. Eggar began a film and television career that quickly gained momentum. In 1970, she starred with Oliver Reed in the psychological thriller “The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun,” in which she impulsively drove her boss’s car to the Riviera, was attacked at a gas station and later found a dead body in the trunk of the car.

In the years after her divorce from the actor Tom Stern in 1971, Ms. Eggar balanced her career ambitions with raising her daughter and her son, Nicolas. “She was a working actor, and she brought her talent and class to anything and everything that she did,” Ms. Stern, her daughter, said.

In 1972, she took on the role of a British governess brought to 19th-century Siam (now Thailand) to educate the king’s 12-year-old heir in “Anna and the King,” a short-lived television series on CBS adapted from the 1956 musical film “The King and I” (but without the music). Yul Brynner reprised his role as the king, which he had originated on Broadway in 1951.

She appeared in several horror films in the 1970s and early ’80s, among them David Cronenberg’s “The Brood” (1979), in which she played a traumatized woman who gives birth to homicidal childlike beings.

Ms. Eggar also guest-starred in television series like “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Matlock” and “Magnum, P.I.” She returned to Britain in the 1980s for stage work in Arthur Schnitzler’s drama “The Lonely Road,” as the mistress of a painter played by Anthony Hopkins, and Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” as the vain actress Arkadina to John Hurt’s writer Trigorin.

In addition to her daughter, an actress and photographer, Ms. Eggar is survived by her son, a film and TV producer; three sisters, Margaret Barron, Toni Maricic and Vivien Thursby; and three grandchildren. She never remarried after her divorce but went on to have relationships with several men, including the artist Edward Ruscha and the singer, songwriter and actor Kris Kristofferson.

Since at least the 1990s, Ms. Eggar had acted in dozens of productions staged by the California Artists Radio Theater, voicing parts in works by writers including Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen and Ray Bradbury.

“She had a dignity and greatness about her that was more than American audiences were used to,” Peggy Webber, the founder, producer and director of the radio theater, said in an interview. “She was able to play roles that she probably wouldn’t have had a chance to do otherwise.”