R.I.P. Sam Neill, Jurassic Park star

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1947 as Nigel John Dermot Neill, Neill spent his childhood largely in New Zealand, where he moved in 1954. Neill began dabbling in acting in university, and his first professional on-screen role was in the New Zealand television film The City Of No in 1971. A breakthrough came in 1977 with Sleeping Dogs, considered a landmark in New Zealand cinema, becoming the first feature-length film produced entirely in the country on 35 mm film. 

After that success, Neill found work in Australia before his career went even more international. In 1981, Neill starred opposite Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej Żuławski’s cult horror classic Possession. In an interview with The A.V. Club, Neill would later call the film “probably the most crazed thing I’ve ever done.” Throughout the 1980s, Neill also starred in other Australian films like For Love Alone, The Umbrella Woman, and Evil Angels, which was later released internationally as A Cry In The Dark. Neill stars opposite Meryl Streep in the film as Michael Chamberlain, a pastor wrongly implicated when his infant daughter was the victim of a dingo attack in the outback. Neill won the Australia Academy of Cinematic and Television Arts Award for his leading performance. In 1990, Neill appeared in The Hunt For The Red October opposite actors like Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, and James Earl Jones. 

But Neill’s biggest role would come in 1993 with Jurassic Park, which would become the highest-grossing film of all time upon its original theatrical run. “We sort of knew at the time that we were on the threshold of something very different and new,” Neill reflected later. “You know, it was a smart, popcorn-friendly idea, but it was also where these new technologies were coming into their own.” Neill would eventually return to the franchise for 2001’s Jurassic Park III and 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion. Also in 1993, Neill appeared in The Piano, which won the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival. 

Neill’s career remained consistent throughout the 2000s as he landed recurring roles in series like The Tudors, Crusoe, Alcatraz, and Peaky Blinders, in which he appeared from 2013 until 2014 as Major Chester Campbell, a main antagonist of the show’s first two seasons. In 2024, he acted opposite Annette Benning in the Peacock series Apples Never Fall. Neill was diagnosed with cancer in 2022, though he worked fairly consistently throughout this time, telling The Guardian in a recent interview that he had been in chemo for five years. He took some of the time away from film acting to work on a memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This? Though he recovered from the cancer, he seemed to have made some peace with his illness, telling The Guardian in 2023, “I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me.”