Actor Sam Neill died on Monday July 13 in Sydney at the age of 78, according to a statement released by his family. The star of Jurassic Park announced in April that he had beaten cancer after five years of treatment (he had stage III lymphoma, a type of blood cancer). “The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer-free,” reads the statement released by his family on the actor’s Instagram account.
Nigel John Dermot Neill was born in 1947 in Omagh, Northern Ireland, to a British mother and a New Zealander father. In 1954, the family moved to New Zealand. He took the name Sam, rather than Nigel, because there were too many children called Nigel at his school. He regarded all of that as his first performance: changing countries, changing his name, overcoming his stammer. “I think, looking back, that was a reordering of myself. I once heard that acting is pretending to be someone else, but pretending with great sincerity. At first I pretended to be a New Zealander, but I pretended with great sincerity because I was a skinny, stammering boy called Nigel in a place where, if you sounded like a Nigel, you’d get a slap round the ear. So I decided to stop sounding like a Nigel, I changed my voice and behaved differently,” he said in an interview with this newspaper in 2020.
He attended school and university in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. He first became involved in acting at the University of Canterbury, also in New Zealand, where he studied English literature. In Wellington, he joined the Downstage Theatre, where he earned around 35 dollars a week as an actor and was given the leftovers from the dinners served to the audience.
He made his film debut in Sleeping Dogs (1977) and achieved international fame for playing the lead role of Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park (1993). “At least back then we had giant puppets, although in other scenes the only reference point we had to look at was a tennis ball tied to a stick that Steven Spielberg was holding and moving around. In fact, in Jurassic Park all the sets were real, but now you walk onto the set and there are only green screens all around you. They put you on a green platform and you have to imagine everything that will be added digitally later. It’s not much fun. I’m not a big fan,” he confessed to this newspaper.
Another of his passions was wine: “I’m a winegrower; I own four vineyards, and I’m very attached to my grapes, my animals, and my family. So in that respect, my life is entirely predictable, marked by the four seasons.” Incidentally, all his animals were named after famous people: “Of course, because who would dare to eat a cow called Susan Sarandon?” he said in another interview with this newspaper in 2019. These farming tasks didn’t bring in much money, he said, but they did bring him “happiness”. “My nails are clean now, but I’m usually as grubby as a farmer.”
He also appeared in films such as Possession (1981), The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Piano (1993), In the Mouth of Madness (1994) and Event Horizon (1997), as well as series such as Peaky Blinders. Over the course of his five-decade career, he appeared in more than 150 productions. He prided himself on being a non-competitive person in a world like the film industry: “I’m happy when others do well. I don’t worry about it. And I know people who let themselves be consumed by thoughts like ‘things aren’t going well,’ ‘I’m not being given my big break,’ or ‘they’ve given the part to someone else.’ Who cares? I don’t care either way.” He even went so far as to turn down the title of sir on several occasions.
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