Acclaimed New Zealand actor Sam Neill contracted pneumonia before he died, co-star says

Sam Neill, the 78-year-old New Zealand actor best known for his role in Jurassic Park, died on Monday after contracting pneumonia, a co-star said.

Rima Te Wiata, a Kiwi actor who appeared with Neill in the 2016 comedy “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” told The New Zealand Herald that he was “a very steady, peaceful, grounded man.”

In an interview with the outlet, Te Wiata recounted times when Neill told the press that he wasn’t afraid of death but that he’d be “annoyed” by it.

Neill’s death came after he said he was cancer-free in April, years after he was diagnosed with stage-three non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

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“It really sucks actually,” Te Wiata said. “I think he would be like: ‘For goodness sake, I got over my cancer. And now look, now I get pneumonia. What next?’.”

Neill’s family announced his death on Monday via an Instagram post, saying he died while at St. Vincent’s Private Hospital in Sydney, Australia.

“Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterized his whole life,” they said. “The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free.”

Neill, who starred as paleontologist Alan Grant opposite co-stars Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough in 1993’s “Jurassic Park,” has been remembered in tributes from around the world.

Dern, 59, called Neill “my beloved lifetime friend,” in a social media post.

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“He showed me the depths of loyalty, protectiveness, and love, always with the driest of wit. He was a true and noble gentleman, wrapped up in my dream leading man,” Dern wrote.

Goldblum posted a slideshow of pictures from the movie alongside the message: “The next great adventure begins. Love, always and forever.”

In a statement to Variety, director Steven Spielberg said he “adored making all the ‘Jurassic’ movies with him.”

“Along with Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, we will always have our ‘Jurassic’ family and Sam will never be forgotten by us or his many millions of fans around the world,” Spielberg added.

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Laura Tingle, a journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation who also dated Neill for several years, revealed that he had been sick for “the last couple of weeks,” in an interview with ABC Radio Sydney.

“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,” Tingle said.

“He’d had a lot of chemo and a lot of immunotherapy and, thankfully, it finally cleared him of the blood cancer that he had, but that left him pretty compromised in terms of his immune system,” she added.

Over his decades-long career, Neill has had more than 150 acting credits in movies and TV shows, including “The Hunt for Red October,” “The Piano,” “Event Horizon” and “Merlin.”

In 2013, Neill took a role on Peaky Blinders, an award-winning crime series set in Britain after the World War I.

Co-star Cillian Murphy remembered Neill as “one of the kindest, funniest and gentlest people, and one of the finest actors,” in a statement provided to Page Six.

Nicole Kidman also paid tribute to Neill, whom she met as a young actress on the set of the 1989 Australian thriller “Dead Calm.”

“We met when I was just 18 and he took me under his wing and we stayed friends for life. He was charming, kind, funny and intelligent,” she said in a statement to the Sydney Morning Herald.

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Neill was born in 1947 in Omagh, a town of about 20,000 in Northern Ireland. In the early 1950s, he moved to New Zealand with his family.

For his outstanding contributions to film, Neill was awarded a knighthood in New Zealand in 2022.