New Zealand actor Sam Neill has died at the age of 78. In 2024, he spoke with Alex Casey about his extraordinary life on our screens.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sam Neill, one of the best-known and most beloved New Zealand actors of all time, has died at the age of 78. \u201cIt is with immense sadness that the wh\u0101nau of Sam Neill share the news of his passing on Monday 13th July, in Sydney Australia,\u201d his family shared on his social media accounts on Monday night. \u201cSam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life. The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey would like to express their deepest gratitude to the staff at St Vincent\u2019s Private Hospital for their incredible care. More details will be shared later, but for now, on behalf of the family, we ask that you respect their privacy as they navigate this immeasurable loss.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sense of loss that will be felt by several generations of film and television fans across Aotearoa and the world this week. Over the last five decades, Neill established himself as one of our country\u2019s most respected and versatile screen performers with an unmatched filmography. After his breakthrough role in Sleeping Dogs in 1977, Neill went on to appear in cult horror favourites like Possession, Dead Calm and Omen III in the 80s, before starring in mainstream blockbusters in the 90s like Jurassic Park, The Hunt for Red October and Event Horizon.<\/p>\n
Sam Neill in Steven Spielberg\u2019s Jurassic Park<\/p>\n
Throughout his illustrious international career, Neill always returned home. In 1993 he starred in Jane Campion\u2019s Oscar-winning film The Piano, before turning the lens inwards in Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam Neill in 1995. In the 2000s he played the charming stranger known only as \u2018The Man\u2019 in Gaylene Preston\u2019s Perfect Strangers, the mysterious Mr Jones in the Maurice Gee adaptation Under the Mountain, and the inimitable curmudgeon Hec in Taika Waititi\u2019s Hunt for the Wilderpeople.<\/p>\n
In 2024, while he was doing press for courtroom drama series The Twelve, I was lucky enough to get 20 minutes on Zoom with Neill for our My Life in TV series. He was extremely charming and cordial, even when asked about failing all four of his first year law papers at university. \u201cI just didn\u2019t have the brain or the application to pull it off,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I\u2019d become a barrister, my father would have considered that a real job. He liked what I did, but it wasn\u2019t a real job as far as he was concerned\u2026 Now I can just be a pretend lawyer,\u201d he chuckled.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here is everything else Neill had to say about his extraordinary life on our screens, and what he loved to watch on television himself.<\/p>\n
Julian Dennison and Sam Neill in The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Image: Supplied)<\/p>\n
My earliest TV memory is\u2026 We must have been about the last country in the world to actually get television. We had a great big TV set at the time which took up half the room, but had a very small screen, about the size of a computer screen. We all gathered around it watching black and white shows, and I very much clearly remember Dad swearing and fiddling with the aerials. It was often a very frustrating experience, but it was sort of amazing to have moving images in your own sitting room. Bonanza is probably the earliest thing I remember watching on TV.<\/p>\n
My first onscreen role was\u2026 I think the first thing I did that I\u2019d actually own up to would be a little docu-drama called Ashes<\/a> made by Pacific Films. Barry Barclay wrote it, and I played a priest in it. That was the first time I thought, \u201coh, this is interesting, this is something that maybe I could do\u201d. There was almost no work for actors on screen in New Zealand at that time, so it was something that I never considered would be possible. But events took over, and that\u2019s what I ended up doing.<\/p>\n My earliest television crush was\u2026 Emma Peel in The Avengers. Like most of New Zealand, I was dreaming about her at night. I was living in Christchurch at the time, and I remember the whole of Christchurch would get up at the same time and go to the lav during the commercial break. So there would be this sort of tidal wave, and the sewage system in Christchurch always had a lot of problems during The Avengers.\u00a0<\/p>\n The NZ TV ad I can\u2019t stop thinking about is\u2026 I think the cheesier the better, really. But the one that I\u2019ve never been able to get out of my head is the early Chesdale Cheese ad<\/a>. It\u2019s an old-fashioned cartoon, with these two blokes in gumboots singing \u201cwe are the blokes from down on the farm, we really know our cheese.\u201d And it ended with this extraordinary couplet: \u201cit\u2019s ched-dar, made bet-ter. That\u2019s a really bad rhyme and shouldn\u2019t be encouraged.\u00a0<\/p>\n My TV guilty pleasure is\u2026 This really is guilty. There was a while where I just could not watch the news any more. Everything was so depressing and alarming, Ukraine and Gaza and the looming elections in the US and so on, and so I\u2019d have to watch something really, really stupid. I got hooked \u2013 not for long \u2013 but I did get hooked on Married at First Sight Australia. I am so embarrassed to say, but it\u2019s just excruciating and hilarious. Everything about it is toe-curling, but that is what is so great about it. Utterly toe-curling and you get so caught up in it. It\u2019s ridiculous.\u00a0<\/p>\n My favourite television show of all time is\u2026 That\u2019s easy: Babylon Berlin. It\u2019s an extremely ambitious show set at the end of the Weimar Republic, just before the rise of the Nazis. And it follows two main characters \u2013 a detective who has PTSD from the first war and a drug addiction, and a young woman who is a wannabe detective also a part time sex worker. Every level of society is explored and it has such great storylines. Those first two seasons of Babylon Berlin were the greatest thing I\u2019ve ever seen on television.\u00a0<\/p>\n My favourite character I\u2019ve ever played on TV is\u2026 I don\u2019t have favourites, that\u2019s policy. But the television character that I\u2019ve got the most positive feedback from is Inspector Campbell from Peaky Blinders. He was a lot of fun to play, a very multi-layered, complex character.<\/p>\nSam Neill in Ashes, his first onscreen role<\/p>\n
Sam Neill in Peaky Blinders<\/p>\n