New Zealand actor Sam Neill passed away this Monday in Sydney at the age of 78, according to a statement from his family. The star of Jurassic Park announced in April that he had overcome cancer after five years of treatment (it was a 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 Zealand father. In 1954 the family moved to New Zealand. He took the name Sam, instead of Nigel, because there were too many children named Nigel at his school. He considered all that his first performance: changing country, changing name, correcting his stutter. “I think in retrospect that was a rearrangement of myself. I once heard that acting is pretending to be someone else, but pretending it very sincerely. At first, I pretended to be a New Zealander, but I pretended it very sincerely because I was a skinny, stuttering boy named Nigel in a place where if you sounded like a Nigel, you got a smack. So I decided to stop sounding like a Nigel, 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 town of Christchurch. He had his first contact with acting at the University of Canterbury, also in New Zealand, where he studied English literature. In the city of Wellington, he joined the Downstage theatre, where he earned about 35 dollars a week as an actor and received leftover food from dinners served to the public.
He debuted in film with Sleeping Dogs (1977) and gained international fame for playing the lead in Jurassic Park (1993), Dr. Alan Grant. “At least back then we had giant puppets, although in other scenes the only reference we had to look at was a tennis ball tied to a stick that Steven Spielberg held and moved. In fact, in Jurassic Park all the sets were natural, but now you enter 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 digitally added later. It’s not very fun. I kind of hate it,” he confessed to this newspaper.
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Another of his passions was wine: “I am a winemaker, I own four vineyards, and I am very attached to my grapes, my animals, and my family. So in that aspect, my life is absolutely predictable, marked by the four seasons.” By the way, all his animals had names of celebrities: “Of course, because who would dare to eat a cow named Susan Sarandon?” he said in another interview with this newspaper in 2019. These farming tasks didn’t bring him much money, he said, but they did bring “happiness.” “Now I keep my nails clean, but usually I go around dirty like 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 like Peaky Blinders. Over his five-decade career, he participated in more than 150 productions. He prided himself on being a non-competitive person in a world like cinema: “I’m happy when others do well. I don’t worry. And I know people who let themselves be consumed by thoughts like ‘things aren’t going well,’ ‘I’m not getting my big chance,’ or ‘they gave the role to someone else.’ Who cares? I don’t care.” He even declined the title of Sir on several occasions.
