It’s difficult to accept because of the timing. Sam Neill sounded almost ecstatic when he declared in late April that he was cancer-free, citing an Australian clinical trial that had accomplished what years of chemotherapy had failed to. He passed away on July 13 at the age of 78 in a Sydney hospital, and the cause of his death was not the uncommon blood cancer that he had notably survived. Pneumonia was the cause. Every day, doctors treat an infection.
In an oddly cinematic turn of events, his illness started in March 2022 while he was on the press tour for Jurassic World Dominion. While doing interviews for the franchise that made him famous, Neill noticed swollen glands. The diagnosis was stage-three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare and aggressive blood cancer. He acknowledged in his memoir that he believed he was “possibly dying,” a statement that now sounds very different. According to him, the subsequent chemotherapy was quite harsh, and at one point it just stopped working.
CAR T-cell therapy, an immunotherapy that re-engineers a patient’s own immune cells to hunt the cancer, was what saved him, at least temporarily. When traditional treatment failed, he signed up for a trial in Australia, and it was successful. There was a sense of a man who had truly accepted his mortality and been given his life back when he made his April announcement. When he passed away, he was working with the Snowdome Foundation to expand access to the same treatment throughout Australia and New Zealand. That particular detail reveals something about him.
However, the math involved in cancer treatment is harsh. On ABC radio, his former partner, journalist Laura Tingle, put it simply: five years of intense treatment, heavy chemotherapy, heavy immunotherapy, and a severely weakened immune system. His body had little left to fight with when pneumonia struck. She claimed that everyone who loved him had been encouraging him to continue despite his illness for a few weeks. One recovery was too much to ask for.
Anyone observing his last year is struck by how tenaciously he continued to work. While he continued to manage Two Paddocks, his Central Otago winery, he shot four consecutive film projects in 12 months, all of which were scheduled for release soon. The public never fully realized how precarious his health remained beneath the productivity, which may be why Philip Grenz, his representative, described him as an extremely private man who detested a fuss. There’s a sense that Neill would rather work than wait.
Nicole Kidman, Cillian Murphy, Toni Collette, and Alec Baldwin were among the many celebrities who quickly paid their respects to the actor from Jurassic Park and The Piano, as well as to a well-known and respectable figure in an industry lacking in them. In their announcement, his family used the Māori word whānau to express their relief that he passed away at St. Vincent‘s without cancer while surrounded by loved ones. His farm in New Zealand will host a private memorial. The family has directed mourners toward his causes—a foundation for rural hospitals, blood cancer research, and New Zealand’s wilderness areas—instead of flowers. When his last films will be released is still unknown, but they will be a final farewell from a man who, up until the very end, just kept going.
