For many viewers Sam Neill will remain the man who in Jurassic Park shows his glasses, looks up and tries to understand how it is possible to have a live dinosaur in front. The New Zealand actor died on Monday 13 July in Sydney, Australia. She was 78. The family said that death was “improved and unexpected” and that Neill was surrounded by his loved ones. A cause has not been communicated.
The character that made him famous all over the world was Alan Grant, the pragmatic paleontologist and little interested in the children chosen by John Hammond to visit his dinosaur park. Neill played him for the first time in the film directed by Steven Spielberg in 1993, when he had already behind a rather long career. He returned to the role in Jurassic Park III, 2001, and in Jurassic World – The domain, released in 2022.
Neill was born in 1947 in Omagh, Northern Ireland, under the name Nigel John Dermot Neill. His father was New Zealand and, when he was seven, the family moved to Christchurch, in the country of origin. He studied English Literature and began working for the National Film Unit of New Zealand, where he worked on documentaries as director, screenwriter and editor, before devoting himself mainly to acting.
His first role in New Zealand was Sleeping Dogs, 1977. In the following years he worked in Australia and Europe, moving from the historical drama My brilliant career to the much more disturbing film Possession, directed in 1981 by Andrzej Żuławski. At the end of the 1980s he recited with Meryl Streep in A cry in the night and with Nicole Kidman in 10 o’clock: calm flat, two films that made him a face known outside Australia and New Zealand.
In the nineties he alternated major American productions and smaller films: he was a Soviet officer in Hunt in Red October, the authoritarian husband of Holly Hunter in Piano Lesson and a writer dragged into a horror story in the Seed of John Carpenter’s madness. On television he played Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in the Tudors and policeman Chester Campbell in the first two seasons of Peaky Blinders. Later he was one of the protagonists of Selvaggi on the run, the New Zealand comedy directed by Taika Waititi in 2016.
In 2023 Neill had told in his autobiography, Did I Ever Tell You This?, to have received the previous year a diagnosis of angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare form of blood cancer. After chemotherapy had stopped working, he had undergone a CAR-T cell therapy and had entered remission. A few months before his death he said he was still free from cancer; the family also reiterated it in the statement with which he announced his disappearance.
Outside the Neill set he spent a lot of time in Central Otago, on the South Island of New Zealand, where in 1993 he founded the Two Paddocks winery. He mainly produced Pinot nero and social media often published videos of the animals of his farm, to which he gave the names of actors and friends. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1991 and in 2022 he accepted the title of Knight of the Order to the merit of New Zealand, after initially rejecting it because he considered it too solemn.
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