Obituary for the actor Sam Neill: He shone even next to Spielberg’s dinosaurs

After switching to the cinema ten years later (with a detour via television), he shot without personal vanity for directors such as Andrzej Żuławski, John McTiernan, Jane Campion and Steven Spielberg.

What he said in his 2023 memoir “Did I Ever Tell You This?” writes about filming with Jane Campion, who won the screenplay Oscar in 1994 with “The Piano”, basically represents his entire career.

“Nobody pays much attention to you, you don’t get nominated for awards. But you did your part. I was in an important feminist film. I was at the forefront of an important New Zealand film. None of those labels do the film justice. It’s a work of art. And look, that tiny little figure in the fabric – do you see it down there on the right? – that’s me. It’s a film that will always have a place in film history. And I was in it.”

In “Did I Ever Tell You This?” Neill also spoke publicly about his illness for the first time. He had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma the year before and had undergone chemotherapy. It wasn’t until April of this year that he came back to the public with the news that he had beaten cancer after undergoing gene therapy.

“It’s time for me to make another film.” On Monday morning, the family of the “Jurassic Park” lead actor surprisingly announced on his Instagram profile that Sam Neill had died at the age of 78. His most recent appearance was in the Netflix miniseries “Untamed.”

Sam Neill hasn’t been one to push himself to the forefront, not even in a leading role. The best example is his appearance in Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” trilogy, in which he plays paleontologist Alan Grant in the first and third parts.

Grant is a nerd in an Indiana Jones outfit who has to save a group of children from marauding dinosaurs in the titular dinosaur park. Of course, the attraction of the film is not the human stars, but the computer-generated dinosaurs, which were spectacular for the time, a miracle of biology – and technology.

Humans disappear alongside grazing brontosaurs, reduced to the smallest link in the food chain of the mighty T-Rex. But to seriously exist alongside these special effects in a film that aims to amaze more than anything else is quite an achievement.

“Jurassic Park” made Sam Neill, the “tiny little figure in the bottom right of the picture,” a star for a brief moment. 1993 was the year in which he became known in Hollywood with Dinowunder and “The Piano”, as it is customary to say in the industry. household name became. In 1998 he filmed “The Horse Whisperer” with Robert Redford.

From Down Under to Hollywood

Sam Neill came to America in the late 1980s as one of the most prominent actors from “Down Under”. He starred in the 1977 thriller Sleeping Dogs, the first New Zealand production to be shot on 35mm. In Australia in 1988 he took on the role of Meryl Streep’s husband in the outback drama “A Cry in the Dark”, based on true events.

Unforgettable for the unofficial genre of the “Berlin film” is the Wall City body horror film “Possession” (1981) by the Polish eccentric Andrzej Żuławski, in which he plays the husband of Isabelle Adjani. In the memorable finale of the bizarre marital drama, the French film star gives birth to a monster.

It speaks for Neill that in his autobiography he describes working with Campion as his awakening experience as an actor. But filming “The Piano” was also the loneliest months of his life. In it he plays a brutal colonizer in 19th century New Zealand, which is subordinate to the British crown, who marries a mute widow (Holly Hunter). His colleague had isolated herself from her acting partner on set, so that the director sometimes had to hug him at the end of the day.

Over the past quarter century, Sam Neill has remained busy, but above all has distinguished himself as a solid character actor who is appreciated by his colleagues (including in the series “Peaky Blinders” in the role of the sadistic Chief Inspector Campbell).

Acting was never his main occupation. At the same time, Neill had also made a name for himself as an environmental activist and owner of an ecologically managed winery. In the journal Thought Economics, he described his life motto during the pandemic as follows: “We should identify ourselves as people first, not through our jobs. I’m Sam, and sometimes I’m an actor.” Sam Neill will be remembered as a person and as an actor.