Samantha Eggar (1939-2025)

[GaryC]

Samantha Eggar, aged 86.

[Beloved Aunt]

She doesn't seem to have had the kind of career one might expect from the fact that one of her earliest film roles was in a William Wyler film for which she was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar no less. But I wouldn't really know, I haven't seen hardly any of her other films.

[domino harvey]

Well their working relationship was notoriously fraught with drama, so she may have been blackballed

[Beloved Aunt]

Wow really? Was she supposed to be hard to work with in general?

[colinr0380]

The Brood of course is the big one, with the transgressive birthing-licking blood from the newborn scene that deserves to rank as one of Cronenberg's great body horror climaxes alongside the final battle in Scanners, or the ending of The Fly. Its sort of about literalising the metaphorical (or externalising the internal psychological themes) to the ultimate extent!

Lots and lots of horror roles, many of them at the wackier, supernatural end of the spectrum. Her next most famous is probably being kidnapped by Terence Stamp in The Collector (which probably began the run of 'kidnapped "love" story' horror films that led to things like Blind Beast and 1980's Tattoo).

The mid-1960s through to the late 70s were her big period. She was in another cult Canadian horror with Curtains; the Italian/German zombie film The Etruscan Kills Again/The Dead Are Alive; in the astonishingly goofy killer hand movie Demonoid: The Messenger of Death; in one segment of Rank's belated attempt to jump on the Amicus anthology horror trend with 1977's Canadian-UK co-production cat-themed The Uncanny; as well as another film with Donald Pleasance which really needs to be rediscovered, 1963's true crime horror Dr. Crippen.

But if horror is not your thing she had a couple of notable non-horror roles as well, as the female lead in the 1967 Dr Dolittle; the weird love triangle lighthouse themed Jules Verne drama The Light At The Edge of the World (love that trailer: "With Samantha Egg-ar as a Woman....!"), and in a love triangle in the Sean Connery as Irish-American for the first time in his career film The Molly Maguires (which I would really like to see rediscovered if only so that I can see it in its correct widescreen aspect ratio some time!)

[Beloved Aunt]

Pauline Kael had praise for her perf in the Ritt film. Blackballing, for whatever reason, seems a pretty plausible explanation for the odd pattern of her career. Would like to know more about that! Seriously who else goes from a Wyler film to mostly a whole bunch of horror movies that, no offense Colin, I've never heard of? (aside from The Brood) Maybe Vincent Price or something, but he's way more famous than she is and clearly has a predilection, and natural aptitude for horror and made way more stuff than she did. (Though the same could be said for Eggar's face--she makes a good scream queen/horror diva).

[Beloved Aunt]

All the more so because Vincent Price never had the respectability/kind of cultural cachet to be nominated for an Academy Award, even though some of his performances were very highly acclaimed.

[domino harvey]

Wow really? Was she supposed to be hard to work with in general?

He basically terrorized her during the entire shoot because he wasn’t happy with what she was doing (and was perhaps bitter that Natalie Wood wasn’t available for the role), and for her part she was pretty frazzled and inexperienced throughout and required a lot of handholding and workarounds. Ironically they both got Oscar noms despite (or perhaps because of) the bad blood and contentious filming conditions, which were well known in the industry

[Beloved Aunt]

Natalie Wood lol! Can you imagine. Maybe Wyler could get something good out of her, if anyone could (though Kazan didn't IMHO), but... uhhh...

[therewillbeblus]

Samantha Eggar is so incredibly enjoyable to watch in one of my long-championed favorites, The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun. My writeup:

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun
A 'wrong (wo)man' psychological thriller/road movie drenched in psychedelia, that is in dire need of image enhancement to digest its full effect (thank you Tarantino, from the future). Samantha Eggar carries the film as an empowered female individualist, who maintains a sense of self-actualized characterization even whilst she and we begin to doubt her sanity. It's not an easy grift to pull off, but this is a grindhouse gem fueled by pop-art incisions, potent personalities, and intrusive shocks to film grammar that trigger narrative ellipses, all in good fun. The film plays like a fusion of Gaslight, Le monte-charge and North by Northwest set on the tracks of Two-Lane Blacktop's raw, lyrical yet palpable manifestation of free yet lonely spirit, but erupting into its own tone of bewildering urgency.

I haven't seen the 2015 remake, but have to imagine that any intrigue it merits will inevitably be deprived of the pulsating 70s aesthetics and rugged rhythm of the original. This bleeding aura of sloppy edits, music and lighting engages the audience with such a specific perverse tension that an otherworldly spell is cast, framing the most irrational projections as a sensible internal logic to the time. The subject matter fits so well in an era of psychosocial confusion in a cultural wasteland that the film's trajectory of becoming boiled down to the psychological defense mechanism of displacement is terrifyingly believable rather than exasperatingly disposable.

Spoiler

The need for a nearly 20-minute 'explanation' by Reed with deliberately-paced self-indulgent fervor, interrupting the climax in the most abrasive fashion, is a hilariously-executed, cheeky jab at narrative-hijacking. Yet the punchline that follows is even better- as Eggar's 20-second, cooly-delivered Last Words emasculate Reed's accumulated satiety, to end the movie with a stunned look, impotent lowering of the gun, and rapid edit past interpersonal catharsis. We see Eggar exit the police station, and are left to assume that Reed and his wife were convicted, I guess, but the subversive deflation of expected showdown theatrics or narrative follow-through is so bold and deliciously enunciated that I'm still elated from its anti-high. I'm a bit surprised Tarantino loves it so much (even though the rest of the film is so firmly up his alley) because the finish is the exact opposite approach he takes to his own endings, running counter to his ethos of what movies can and should accomplish!

[FrauBlucher]

As a teen in the 70s this was my first exposure to Samantha Eggar here

[Aunt Peg]

My favourite Samantha Eggar performance and film was J. Lee Thompson's Return from the Ashes (1965).

The novel on which is was based was later adapted again by Christian Petzold as Phoenix (2014). A good film but to lesser affect than the 1965 version.