Sam Neill, Hollywood ‘sex symbol’ who appeared in Jurassic Park and was tipped to be the next James Bond
Tuesday, 14 July 2026
Sam Neill, actor, was born on September 14, 1947. He died on July 13, 2026, aged 78
Sam Neill feared he was going to die while he was filming Jurassic Park. The danger had nothing to do with cloned dinosaurs and everything to do with Hurricane Iniki, which hit the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where the movie was being filmed.
Holed up in the ballroom of their hotel with director Steven Spielberg and the rest of the cast and crew, the chandeliers rocked, the ceiling buckled and the power failed as the winds gusted at up to 225mph. “We thought we'd be destroyed,” Neill recalled. When his co-star Laura Dern asked him if they were going to die, he replied, “Yes, I think we might, Laura.”
By the following morning the film sets had been completely destroyed and six people had been killed in the storm, the strongest ever to hit the island. But Neill and Dern survived and footage shot during the hurricane was used in the film. On its release in 1993, Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing film, overtaking Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. It held the record until surpassed by Titanic in 1997.
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While Iniki was wreaking its trail of destruction, Neill could have been forgiven for asking “how did I get into this?” He had been only third choice to play the palaeontologist Alan Grant, landing the role less than a month before filming was due to start, after William Hurt and Harrison Ford had turned the part down. “It all happened real quick,” he said. “I hadn't read the book, knew nothing about it, hadn't heard anything about it, and suddenly I'm working with Spielberg.”
By then Neill had been a leading man for more than a decade in films such as My Brilliant Career (1979), Possession (1981) and The Hunt For Red October (1990) and had auditioned to replace Roger Moore as James Bond, losing out to Timothy Dalton. Yet playing Grant in Jurassic Park became his signature role and he revived the part in Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World: Dominion (2022).
Although he kept a home in Los Angeles for work purposes, he was never comfortable with the Hollywood star system and was happiest supporting the Antipodean film industry, to which he showed a strong loyalty.
In Fred Schepisi's A Cry in the Dark (1988), based on the infamous “dingo baby” case, he all but eclipsed his co-star Meryl Streep with a heart-rending display of stoicism as the deeply religious husband standing by his wife Lindy Chamberlain, wrongly accused of murdering their baby and sentenced to life imprisonment.
His performance in Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) as the bewildered New Zealand frontiersman who finds it difficult to express his feelings towards his mute bride-to-be, played by Holly Hunter, was another triumph of understatement.
The restraint and reserve he displayed on screen was reflected in his low-key style off it. One interviewer complained that he was almost impossible to write about: “He doesn't have a drink problem. He's not had to battle with drugs. He's no gambler. He's secure in his sexuality. He's not a hell-raiser and he eschews the celebrity lifestyle, which he considers somewhat distasteful.”
He did not demur from the description and suggested that his Presbyterian upbringing in a remote country where there are more sheep than people had left him with “feelings of guilt if I'm not in bed by midnight”.
His self-deprecation was at times disarming. Early in his career he was regarded as a sex symbol but he scoffed at the idea, insisting that “most of us bumble and fumble about in bed as much as we do in the rest of our lives”. Yet when he found himself stranded by lockdown, to the surprise of everyone, the shy and private actor transformed himself into an all-singing-and-dancing social media influencer.
Leaving New Zealand for America in 2020 to shoot the Apple TV sci-fi series Invasion, he had no idea it would take him the best part of a year to get home.
Forced into Covid isolation, first in London and then in Sydney, he filmed himself playing Radiohead and Randy Newman songs on the ukulele and reading poems and children's books, building up half a million followers online. “I realised people were very frightened and isolated and I thought if I can cheer up one person, that's not a bad ambition,” he said. “But mostly I was entertaining myself. I'm easily bored.”
When New Zealand finally reopened its borders he was relieved to return to his Two Paddocks farm in central Otago. He had owned the estate for 30 years and it was his bolt hole away from the world of red-carpet premieres, although there were plenty of reminders of his other life. The sheep, cows, chickens, ducks and pot-bellied pigs he kept were individually named after fellow film stars and the world-class pinot noir he produced was sold to fashionable restaurants such as the Ivy in London, where it was drunk by many of the theatrical clientele after whom his animals were named.
Although he was reluctant to over-pontificate about the “art” of acting, when it came to the noble grape even the down-to-earth Neill could not help lapsing into the flowery language that seems to be the wine trade's lingua franca. “I love that you can't tell a pinot noir what to do,” he gushed. “It has to express itself. It's like watching a photograph develop. Wine is fascinating and multi-layered and akin to poetry.”
That led some to call him a champagne socialist, for he campaigned for the Australian Labor and New Zealand Labour parties, was a passionate supporter of Greenpeace and a vocal champion of asylum seekers arriving by boat who were deported under Australia's “turnback” policy. “Where's the humanity?” he asked. “These are some of the most unfortunate people in the world and a tiny trickle of them risk their lives to cross dangerous waters in search of a better life.”
He is survived by his son, Tim, from his first marriage to the actress Lisa Harrow, whom he met when they were filming Omen III: The Final Conflict in 1981, and by a daughter, Elena, from his second marriage to Noriko Watanabe, a make-up artist whom he met on the set of the 1989 film Dead Calm, in which he starred opposite Nicole Kidman. Both marriages ended and he described his personal life as “somewhat haphazard” and his parenting style as one of “benign neglect“.
He is also survived by another son, Andrew, from a relationship in his youth, who was given up for adoption. After 25 years without knowing each other, father and son were reunited in 1994. After his second divorce he was in a long-term relationship with the Australian political journalist and author Laura Tingle.
He was born Nigel John Dermot Neill in 1947 in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, to an English-born mother, Priscilla (nee Ingham), and a New Zealand-born father, Dermot Neill, who served in the World War II as a major in the Royal Irish Fusiliers. He recalled rural Ireland before the Troubles “as my idea of the Garden of Eden” and had an unhappy time after the family moved to New Zealand when he was seven.
He was bullied as a boarder at the Anglican Christ's College in Christchurch, stuttered badly and in an attempt to escape his memory he reinvented himself as Sam and took to acting in school plays, when the stutter miraculously disappeared. “Whenever I was on stage, I never missed a beat,” he recalled.
There was no television and during school holidays he spent his afternoons in the cinema watching films such as The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky, finding “something very reassuring about their bulldog spirit”.
After graduating from Victoria University in Wellington with a degree in English literature he toured for a year with a repertory company and then became a hippy documentary maker for the New Zealand National Film Unit.
There was little New Zealand film industry at the time but in 1977 he was cast in the action thriller Sleeping Dogs, the first colour feature film produced entirely in the country. That led to him playing the lead in My Brilliant Career, the Australian entry for the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where his performance caught the attention of James Mason. The veteran English actor became his mentor, sending him a plane ticket to London and introducing him to British film directors and producers.
Among them was Harvey Bernhard, who cast him as Damien Thorn in Omen III. Having done Satan, he then played the Pope in a television movie. He lived in Britain for the next eight years, appearing in Ivanhoe with Mason and playing the lead in the TV series Reilly, Ace of Spies, which took off in America, earned him a Golden Globe nomination and captured the attention of Hollywood.
Noted for his versatility, a late-career highlight was his portrayal of the brutal Major Chester Campbell in Peaky Blinders. “There's nothing about playing a borderline psychotic that I can identify with but it's cathartic being able to act out violence,” he noted.
He castigated those among his fellow actors who “don't feel valid unless they're acting”. It was a trap into which he never fell. “If all I did was acting, I'd go out of my mind,” he confessed, eager as ever to get back to his farm.
Nevertheless, on having lymphoma diagnosed in 2022 and discovering at one stage that the chemotherapy had stopped working, he dismissed the idea of retiring as “intolerable”. As for the prospect of dying he said he found it “annoying” because he wanted to see the olive trees and cypresses he had planted grow to maturity, along, of course, with his grandchildren. Beyond that, he added, “I couldn't care less.”