Sam Neill: the stammering schoolboy who became a Hollywood great

As a child, Sam Neill always wanted to be in a western. He changed his name from Nigel when he was 11 because he thought Sam sounded more like what a cowboy was called. Years later, having become an actor, Neill ran into Clint Eastwood, king of the westerns, and told him of this unrealised ambition. “He demystified it,” Neill recalled. “He said: ‘You just wear a big hat and squint a bit.’”

Arguably the most memorable moment of Neill’s film career came doing just that. As the palaeontologist Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, he is being given a tour of Richard Attenborough’s island when the Jeep stops in a paddock and his attention is caught by movement to his left. The camera stays on Grant as he clumsily pulls off his hat, stands up in the car and removes his sunglasses to stare in wonder at a slow-moving beast with a 30ft neck.

“It’s … it’s a dinosaur,” he says. “We’re going to make a fortune,” adds the lawyer travelling with him, who soon became a T rex lunch. Neill’s scientist is more delighted that his theory has been proved correct. “They’re moving in herds,” he says, his eyes panning across an empty field that was later with CGI dinosaurs.

The lawyer was right. Jurassic Park took $1bn at the box office in two weeks and spawned six sequels, two of which starred Neill. They made the actor more than enough to indulge his love of wine-making on his New Zealand estate, but despite a lengthy CV, Neill’s everyman quality helped him to avoid fame’s burden. He said he liked being able to go into Starbucks, give his real name and find that no one blinked.

While Spielberg’s 1993 film became a cultural sensation, Neill insisted that it was not a dinosaur movie any more than Jaws was about a shark. “These are films about people,” he said. “The dinosaurs are bigger than us but they’re just bloody bit players.” He joked, however, that the older he got, the more he started to resemble a dinosaur.

Spielberg had cast Neill after seeing him in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm, but he was not his first choice. Harrison Ford and William Hurt were asked before him. Like many actors, Neill had a long list of films he was almost in – he was considered for Indiana Jones and the roles that went to Alan Rickman in Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – though he was relieved that Timothy Dalton was preferred as James Bond, saying he had been forced to audition. “You really don’t want to be the Bond that no one likes,” he said. He had earlier been nominated for a Golden Globe as a British secret agent in Reilly: Ace of Spies.

Nonetheless, he had a long run as leading man in such films as My Brilliant Career (1979), Possession (1981) and Sirens (1994). It was the first that led to his big break when he was telephoned by the actor James Mason, who had enjoyed the film and invited Neill to stay with him in Switzerland and meet his agent. That led to roles in Ivanhoe and as the devil’s son in Omen III: The Final Conflict. He was also in Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano and later such TV series as Merlin, The Tudors and Peaky Blinders.

Nigel John Dermot Neill was born on the kitchen table of the family home in Omagh, Northern Ireland, where his New Zealand-born father was serving with the Royal Irish Fusiliers. The family returned to New Zealand when Neill was seven and he attended boarding school in Christchurch, where he was miserable, in part because of a stammer. He said he grew up hoping people wouldn’t talk to him.

He began a law degree at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, but was drawn to acting, playing Theseus in a student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by the crime writer Ngaio Marsh. After moving to Wellington, he became a jobbing actor on $25 a week and kitchen leftovers. His breakthrough was in the 1977 film Sleeping Dogs, one of the first feature films made in New Zealand. It starred the veteran westerns actor Warren Oates, who on leaving the set shook Neill’s hand and said: “Goodbye, Sam! I’ll see you in the movies.” This filled the young man with confidence.

Neill fathered a son in his early 20s, who was adopted and with whom he was reunited in 1994. He had another son with the actor Lisa Harrow and a daughter with the makeup artist Noriko Watanabe. He accepted a knighthood in the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2022 – having turned one down in 2009 – soon after he was diagnosed with lymphoma.

While he had more than 150 film and television credits – Neill told an anecdote about his daughter being asked at school what her father did for work and replying “my daddy sits in caravans” – he found peace on the Two Paddocks farm and vineyard in Otago that he owned for 30 years. It was his refuge from the showy Hollywood world.

There, he won awards for his pinot noir and looked after a menagerie of animals named after actors. Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, his co-stars in Jurassic Park, were a chicken and a ram respectively; Kylie Minogue was a duck; Helena Bonham Carter was a cow. Neill said he did this “because you can’t eat a friend”.

Sam Neill, actor, born 14 September 1947, died 13 July 2026, aged 78

Photograph by Marty Melville/AFP via Getty Images