actor whose future credits would include The Piano and Hunt for the Wilderpeople<\/a> was \u201cevery bit as shy as she was\u201d.<\/p>\n\u201cAs they drove along, not only was she struggling to get a sentence out to Sam, but the star of Sleeping Dogs was having equal difficulty thinking of what to say to her.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were like two 15-year-olds on a first date. For a long time, she says, there was awkward silence.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"A]()
A stop at the dairy helped break the ice when his wife Linda Milne, left, helped actor Sam Neill prepare a role in 1979’s My Brilliant Career, says former Fair Go presenter Kevin Milne, centre. Also pictured is Tommie Milne, the youngest of Kevin and Linda Milne’s four children. Photo \/ Hagen Hopkins<\/p>\n
Fortunately, a shop came into view, Milne said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSam broke the ice \u2026 \u2018Shall we stop at the dairy and I\u2019ll buy some Summer Rolls?\u2019 A very sweet offer from the movie star, which Linda accepted.<\/p>\n
\u201cCommunications must have improved enough for Linda to show Sam how to handle a horse on hills, because the following year we watched him do it up on the big screen, so strikingly, so elegantly in the highly successful My Brilliant Career.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cherie Howie is an Auckland-based reporter who joined the Herald in 2011. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years and specialises in general news and features.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The couple had known Neill for a year or two when he called asking if Linda could coach…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":531535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[14723,6946,74,6030,29804,634,20106,156,89277,13994,1888,73975,27705,61092,25336,13840,6805,5978,73906,18461,13631,111,139,69,13792,18460,180,8485,110493,1237,3608,1842,102],"class_list":["post-531534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-15yearolds","tag-actors","tag-after","tag-again","tag-date","tag-death","tag-drove","tag-entertainment","tag-equally","tag-feared","tag-first","tag-horseriding","tag-instead","tag-kevin","tag-lessons","tag-like","tag-memory","tag-might","tag-milne","tag-neill","tag-never","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pair","tag-sam","tag-shares","tag-sir","tag-touching","tag-two","tag-were","tag-wife","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/531535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}