On a difficult day of filming the Australian courtroom drama The Twelve, a background extra named Chris Thomas stepped away from set, shaken after being shouted at. Hours later, his phone lit up with a message from the production’s star. “Chris, this is Sam. I hope this is the right number. And I hope you are ok today,” it began. The sender had tracked down Thomas’s number, reassured him that no damage had been done to his reputation, and signed off with a characteristic touch of self-effacement: “Sam N.” — as if the recipient might not know which Sam had written. The text, shared publicly by Thomas after the actor’s death, was not an isolated gesture but a glimpse into the temperament of a man who, for all his global fame, remained a figure of quiet decency.

That death was announced on Monday, 13 July, in Sydney, where Sam Neill passed away at 78, surrounded by family. The statement from his whānau described the loss as “sudden and unexpected,” yet underscored a detail that shaped the final chapter of his life: he remained cancer-free. Neill had been diagnosed in 2022 with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare and aggressive blood cancer, and chronicled his treatment with characteristic candour in a memoir written during chemotherapy. Earlier this year, he revealed that an experimental CAR T-cell therapy had cleared his body of the disease. The cause of his death was not disclosed, but the family’s insistence on his cancer-free status closed the door on the narrative that had shadowed his last years.

For a global audience, Neill was irrevocably the palaeontologist Dr. Alan Grant, the sceptical scientist whose awestruck reaction to a grazing Brachiosaurus — knees buckling, sunglasses removed — became one of the most quoted images of 1990s cinema. Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) made him an international star at 46, but his career had been building for two decades before that, from the New Zealand thriller Sleeping Dogs (1977) to Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) and the cult horror Possession (1981). That same year, 1993, he also delivered a performance of coiled repression as the husband in Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or-winning The Piano, a reminder that his range extended far beyond blockbuster heroics. Later, television audiences would encounter a different Neill entirely: the sadistic, Bible-quoting Inspector Chester Campbell in Peaky Blinders, a villain so meticulously unpleasant that the show’s creator, Steven Knight, recalled the actor’s dismay at being written out. “I don’t want to die,” Neill had protested.

Yet the screen was only one of his stages. In the same year Jurassic Park premiered, Neill planted his first vines in Central Otago, on New Zealand’s South Island, founding the Two Paddocks vineyard. He rejected the term “celebrity wine,” approaching viticulture with the same unhurried seriousness he brought to a role. The pinot noir earned its own accolades, and the farm became his refuge, populated by animals he named after friends and co-stars: a sheep called Jeff Goldblum, a cow named Helena Bonham Carter, a chicken dubbed Meryl Streep. When the pandemic halted film production, he posted ukulele songs, cooking lessons, and deadpan poetry readings, content to be ridiculous if it lifted someone’s mood. This was not a retreat from fame but a parallel life, one that New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon acknowledged by calling him “one of the greats” who “took New Zealand stories to the world.”

Tributes after his death came from both hemispheres and from every corner of the industry. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese praised the “wry and dry, thoughtful and laconic” manner with which he faced illness. Nicole Kidman, who co-starred with him in Dead Calm when she was 18, remembered a man who “took me under his wing, and we stayed friends for life.” Cillian Murphy, his adversary in Peaky Blinders, said he “admired him and adored him in equal measure.” But perhaps the most telling memorial was the text message to a struggling extra, a small, private act that required effort — tracking down a number, choosing the right words — and asked for nothing in return. It is a reminder that the most enduring image of Sam Neill may not be a man staring down a dinosaur, but a man at his vineyard, naming a chicken after a friend, and quietly getting on with the business of being decent.