Sam Neill had pneumonia before his death, co-star says, as tributes pour in

Sam Neill, the acclaimed New Zealand actor, was suffering from pneumonia before his death on Monday, according to a co-star.

Subscribe to read this story ad-free

Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.

Fellow Kiwi actor Rima Te Wiata, who appeared opposite Neill in the 2016 comedy “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” told the New Zealand Herald that Neill was not scared of dying but that he would be “annoyed” by it.

“It really sucks, actually,” she told the outlet’s video show ‘Ryan Bridge TODAY.’

“I think he would be like: ‘For goodness sake, I got over my cancer. And now look, now I get pneumonia. What next?’.” But she added: “He’s on his big journey now.”

Te Wiata did not offer any more detail and it was unclear how recently Neill may have been sick with pneumonia.

Neill’s family announced his death at age 78 on Monday. “The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free,” the family said in a statement, which did not specify a cause of death.

In 2023, Neill wrote in his memoir “Did I Ever Tell You This?” that he was “possibly dying” with stage-three non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But he declared himself cancer-free in April, after several years of treatment for blood cancer.

Tributes have poured in globally for Neill, who was best known for his role playing paleontologist Alan Grant in “Jurassic Park” in 1993, alongside actors Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough.

Dern called him a “beloved lifetime friend,” in a tribute on Instagram. “He was a true and noble gentleman, wrapped up in my dream leading man. I will love you forever, Dr. Alan Grant.”

Goldblum said simply: “The next great adventure begins.”

Director Steven Spielberg said he “adored making all the Jurassic movies with him … We will always have our Jurassic family and Sam will never be forgotten by us or his many millions of fans around the world.”

Laura Tingle, a journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation — who dated Neill for several years — told ABC Radio Sydney on Monday, “his poor old body just sort of got a bit exhausted.”

“He’s been pretty sick for the last couple of weeks and everybody who loved him has been willing him on from near and far, but I think it was just a bit too much to recover from one more time,” she said.

“He’d had a lot of chemo and a lot of immunotherapy and, thankfully, it finally cleared him of the blood cancer that he had, but that left him pretty compromised in terms of his immune system,” she added.

Neill had more than 150 screen credits, including “The Hunt for Red October,” “The Piano,” “Event Horizon” and “Merlin.”

In the 2010s, Neill took up a role in the acclaimed British drama series “Peaky Blinders.” His co-star Cillian Murphy said that “like everyone who knew and worked with Sam, I admired him and adored him in equal measure.”

Murphy said Neill was “one of the kindest, funniest and gentlest people, and one of the finest actors … RIP.”

Nicole Kidman also paid tribute, calling Neill “one of the greats, a joy to be around,” she said. “We met when I was just 18 and he took me under his wing and we stayed friends for life. He was charming, kind, funny and intelligent,” she said in a statement to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Neill was born in Omagh, Northern Ireland, in 1947. In the early 1950s, he relocated to New Zealand with his family. In 2022 he accepted a knighthood in the New Zealand royal honors system.