The death of Sam Neill at the age of 78 is one of those which lands as a particularly heavy blow, and not just because his family shared it had been ‘sudden and unexpected’ – although he was surrounded by his loved ones.
Having successfully remained cancer-free following his stage three diagnosis with a ‘ferocious’ form of blood cancer in 2022, Neill was returning to work and had upcoming movies next year, Godzilla x Kong: Supernova and The Last Resort.
He had also continued to operate his Two Paddocks vineyard in New Zealand, set alongside farmland populated by livestock whimsically named after his famous Hollywood colleagues, from Helena Bonham Carter to Michael Fassbender.
It seems like there was so much more to come from the ever-upbeat actor. On confronting his own mortality, he told The Guardian in 2023: ‘I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know?’
But when looking back, the first film people naturally go to when they think of the affable star is Jurassic Park.
As Dr Alan Grant, Neill left an indelible mark on cinema as the ‘cool’ face of palaeontology in the Steven Spielberg classic. He was also that unflappable authority figure in the face of dino danger which many millennials desperately wanted to please.
Yes, Jeff Goldblum’s chaos theorist Ian Malcolm was a fan favourite too, with his casual unbuttoned shirt and semi bad-boy attitude, but there was something about Neill’s Grant that put him in that iconic taciturn category of hero alongside the likes of Indiana Jones and Clint Eastwood’s cowboy characters such as Josey Wales.
The excitement truly reached fever pitch for 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion when he was confirmed to be returning to the franchise alongside Laura Dern as Dr Ellie Sattler and Goldblum again.
But Sam Neill as a performer was so much more than just Jurassic Park.
Despite the breadth and success of his career, not only did the New Zealander never move to Hollywood, but he consistently kept a remarkable balance in his career between major movies and arthouse indies, working plenty still in Australia and New Zealand too – where he made his first feature film Sleeping Dogs, in 1976, which was also the first film from the country to open in the US.
Neill wholeheartedly embraced the opportunities that television offered too, before many of his fellow A-list stars. His 1982 TV film Ivanhoe, in which he plays Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert, has famously been shown on Swedish television nearly every New Year’s Day since the ‘80s. TV miniseries Merlin in 1998 saw Neill nominated for an Emmy and Golden Globe for his take on the titular wizard in his life and times loosely based on the legendary tales of Camelot.
He also made an impact as Henry VIII’s duplicitous advisor Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in Showtime’s splashy historic romp The Tudors in 2007, opposite Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Henry Cavill. As someone studying this specific period at school at the time, it made for a truly excellent (and surprisingly accurate) revision aid.
Neill’s Irish background – he was born in Omagh to a New Zealander father serving in the British Army and an English mother – potentially came into play when he decided to join a brand-new BBC Two period drama in 2013 as a tough Northern Irish police officer determined to (in Neill’s words) ‘clean out the cesspit that is Birmingham in 1919’.
The show was, of course, Peaky Blinders, which has gone on to become one of the most successful TV series anywhere in the world in recent years. His Chief Inspector Chester Campbell proved a worthy – and unhinged – adversary to everyone’s favourite anti-hero gangster, Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy).
And the star had lost none of his taste when it came to recent TV projects either, with Neill celebrating his Silver Logie Australian TV award nomination for The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer just three weeks ago. Meanwhile, his last separate TV project release before his death, Untamed in 2025, was one of the most thrilling crime drama series I had seen in a good while – and certainly one of the best shows of the year. Originally pitched as a limited miniseries following Eric Bana’s National Park Service special agent at Yosemite National Park, it was even renewed for a second season.
But his other film roles deserve just as much celebration too, with the charming actor ironically launching his American career by playing the literal spawn of Satan as the grown-up Damien in Omen III: The Final Conflict.
Other major movies include Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October and The Piano, where he was cast as the jealous settler husband of Holly Hunter’s mute pianist, who cuts off her finger in a rage.
He was also Kirsten Dunst’s over-protective dad/manager in the 2004 rom-com Wimbledon, Scarlett Johansson’s father in The Horse Whisperer and father figure Uncle Hec in Taika Waititi’s delightfully deadpan 2016 film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
Not only has that NZ film continued to charm people in the decade since its release as an indie classic in the making, but it subsequently saw Neill pop up in fun cameos as the Asgardian stage actor playing Odin in Waititi’s two Thor films – despite admitting that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was ‘a complete mystery’ to him.
He is one of few stars who could breezily get away with being clueless, telling Australian radio station Nova of his cameo in Thor: Ragnorak: ‘I mean I was standing beside Jenny Morris and I said, “Do you know what planet we’re on?”
‘To be honest, I was completely baffled.’
It also takes a special type of actor for whom flops later become cult classics, as with 1997’s space sci-fi horror Event Horizon after it was rushed through post-production when Titanic’s projected release date changed. Director Paul W S Anderson told Inverse of the film’s re-evaluation that it ‘finally got the reaction now that I was hoping it would get 25 years ago’, while a scene in which Neill’s character Weir demonstrates how wormholes work with a pen and paper was later replicated in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
And let’s not forget that he was almost James Bond too!
Neill told The Guardian of his impressive career in 2024 that he ‘probably work[s] more than I should, but that’s because I enjoy it so much’.
‘The idea of not working fills me with dread. Some of it is to do with coming from a little place, the most obscure place in the world, as far from anything as you could get, and being asked to do something with an international dimension. How immensely seductive is that?’
And luckily for his fans, there is plenty to choose from when it comes to watching something to celebrate Sam Neill’s life and legacy.
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