Remembering Sam Neill, the Actor Who Made the Impossible Feel Real
After releasing his memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This? in 2023, Sam Neill spoke to The Guardian about the possibility of dying. “I’m not afraid to die,” he said. “But it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses, and I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big. But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.” I’ve been revisiting this conversation ever since the legendary New Zealand actor’s family announced on Instagram early on the morning of July 13, 2026, that he had passed “unexpectedly” in Sydney, Australia, at the age of 78.
It would be too easy to say that Neill, whose eclectic five-decade-long-career has taken him from playing a wild-eyed, pettily cruel spy whose marriage has suddenly imploded in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, to a brilliant engineer sent to investigate the return of a doomed spaceship in Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon, to even auditioning for the role of James Bond, will be remembered as one of the most versatile actors of his generation, and perhaps, as one of the most beloved actors of all time. We’ve known this long before his passing, long before he was diagnosed with stage 3 angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (he was cancer-free at the time of his death), long before we found ourselves trying to measure the legacy he left behind.
I remember, as a young girl, watching Neill as Dr. Alan Grant, the rugged, child-hating paleontologist turned fearless protector in Steven Spielberg‘s Jurassic Park, and thinking, “This is what a movie star looks like. This is a face I’ll remember forever.” When Grant gently but urgently turns Dr. Ellie Sattler’s (Laura Dern) head toward the towering Brachiosaurus for the first time, it felt as though Neill was turning mine, too, inviting me to see both a dinosaur and the limitless possibilities of what movies could make us feel.
I discovered Possession in college, where it quickly became one of my favorite movies of all time, and Neill’s performance opposite Isabelle Adjani remains one of cinema’s greatest acting pairings of all time. But I also came to adore the man behind those performances through his charming social media presence, where he’d post photos of berries and selfies with his ducks, or videos from his winery near Clyde, New Zealand, casually massaging one of his pigs with his foot while holding a glass of wine in one hand and a bottle in the other.
This past July, he supported local advocacy group Sustainable Tarras to stop a gold mine being dug into the Dunstan Mountains in New Zealand’s Central Otago region. It would be the last post he shared on Instagram.
I know I’m far from the only person who learned something about movies and the power of movie stars by watching Neill. If you’ve never ventured beyond Jurassic Park or Possession, now is the time to watch his other movies. Watch Event Horizon. Watch In the Mouth of Madness. Watch The Piano. Let Neill introduce you—and reintroduce you—to the beautiful and impossible.
Categorized:Editorials