After years of chemotherapy, Neill took part in a successful clinical trial for CAR T-cell therapy<\/a>, a form of cancer immunotherapy that is particularly successful in treating certain types of blood cancers.<\/p>\n On Thursday, Neill\u2019s representative, Philip Grenz, said he was revealing Neill\u2019s cause of death after speaking with the actor\u2019s family, due to \u201cinaccuracies and outright falsehoods\u201d in media reporting.<\/p>\n \u201cSam passed away from pneumonia. Prior to becoming sick, Sam had valiantly fought and beaten lymphoma through a new treatment called CAR-T therapy. In addition to running his award-winning winery, Two Paddocks, Sam had filmed four projects back-to-back during the past year, all of which will be released within the coming months,\u201d Grenz wrote in a statement.<\/p>\n He described Neill as \u201can intensely private man who loathed a fuss\u201d, which was why his funeral will be a private memorial held at his farm in New Zealand<\/a> on an undetermined date.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d like to thank those who were truly close to Sam for considering his privacy with the respect he earned and his loved ones need and deserve during this immeasurably difficult time,\u201d Grenz said.<\/p>\n Fans who want to honour Neill\u2019s memory were directed to make donations to \u201cone of the causes he cared about most deeply\u201d instead of sending the family flowers. The causes listed were the Dunstan Hospital Foundation in Central Otago, the area where Neill lived in New Zealand; the Snowdome Foundation, a not-for-profit blood cancer foundation that Neill was campaigning with when he died<\/a> to improve access to blood cancer treatments including CAR-T therapy in Australia and New Zealand; and any New Zealand charities working to protect the local environment and wildlife.<\/p>\n In the statement announcing Neill\u2019s death, his family specified he had not died of cancer. Reports emerged soon after that he had been sick with pneumonia in the days before he died.<\/p>\n Neill\u2019s former partner, the ABC journalist Laura Tingle, told ABC Radio Sydney on Tuesday that years of cancer treatment had exhausted him.<\/p>\n \u201cThe bottom line is he\u2019s been fighting various forms of cancer for at least the last five years intensively, and that takes a toll on anybody\u2019s body and he\u2019d had a lot of chemo and a lot of immunotherapy and thankfully it had finally cleared him of the blood cancer that he had. But that left him pretty compromised in terms of his immune system and I think his poor body just got a bit exhausted, as makes sense,\u201d Tingle said.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s been pretty sick for the last couple of weeks and everybody who loved him has been willing him on from near and far. But I think it was just a bit too much to recover from one more time.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1846.jpg\")
A look back at Sam Neill\u2019s versatile acting career \u2013 video obituary<\/p>\n