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Sam Neill reportedly had pneumonia shortly before his sudden death on Monday.
As tributes for the beloved actor continued around the world, The New Zealand Herald’s Ryan Bridge spoke to Rima Te Wiata, a friend and co-star in the hit film Hunt For The Wilderpeople, who said Neill had been sick with the lung infection recently.
“It really sucks, actually,” Te Wiata said, reflecting on Neill’s unexpected death despite news earlier this year that he was cancer-free.
“As [Neill] said once in the press … he’s not scared of death but he would be annoyed … he would be like ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, I got over my cancer and now look … now I’ve got pneumonia. What next?’
“But he’s on his big journey now.”
While the star of the Jurassic Park movies was diagnosed with the blood cancer non-Hodgkin lymphoma in March 2022, his family said Neill’s death at a Sydney hospital was “sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free”.
In a social media post, they expressed their “deepest gratitude to the staff at St Vincent’s Private Hospital for their incredible care”, adding that “more details will be shared later, but for now, on behalf of the family, we ask that you respect their privacy as they navigate this immeasurable loss”.
While his good humour and charm remained undimmed, the New Zealand-raised actor, documentary-maker and winemaker had faced health challenges while still busy working. His recent projects included the yet-to-be-released films The Fox and Godzilla x Kong: Supernova and TV projects Apples Never Fall and three seasons of The Twelve.
ABC journalist and former partner Laura Tingle said cancer treatments had taken a toll on Neill.
“He’d been fighting various forms of cancer for at least the last five years intensively and that takes a toll on anybody’s body,” she said on ABC 702 Sydney. “He’d had a lot of chemo and a lot of immunotherapy.
“Thankfully, it had finally cleared him of the blood cancer that he had, but that left him pretty compromised in terms of his immune system. I think his poor old body just … got a bit exhausted, as makes sense.
“So 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.”
Tingle, who was in a relationship with Neill from 2018 to 2021, shared a compilation of images of the pair to Instagram with the caption: “Sweet Dreams darling Sam”.
On the red carpet at the Sydney Film Festival premiere of The Fox last month, Neill, who voices the character of a magpie, told The Daily Telegraph was using a walking stick “because I’m going to get a new hip”.
Steven Spielberg, who directed Jurassic Park, said he was saddened by Neill’s death and described him as “exceptionally collaborative” playing Dr Alan Grant.
“It was a stretch for him to play a character who acted as though children were messy and smelly because this was the opposite of the loving father he was to his children,” he told Variety.
Laura Dern, a fellow Jurassic Park star, called him a “beloved lifetime friend [who] showed me the depths of loyalty, protectiveness and love, always with the driest of wit”.
Read more of our coverage of Sam Neill’s death
Sam Neill dies aged 78: Beloved star of Jurassic Park movies mourned
