On a hillside in Central Otago, near the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island, there is a ram named Jeff Goldblum.
Not far from him graze two cows. One is Laura Dern. The other is Helena Bonham Carter. Two pigs answer, more or less, to Amy Adams and Bryan Brown. A rooster patrols the yard under the name Michael Fassbender.
The man who handed out those names died on Monday, July 13, in Sydney, Australia. Sam Neill was 78.
His family announced it on his own social media accounts. They wrote that the death was sudden and unexpected, but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free, and that he was surrounded by the people who loved him. They did not say anything beyond that, and nobody has needed them to.
The cancer had been part of his story since 2023. In March that year he told the world he had angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He talked about it the way he talked about everything else, plainly and without any performance of bravery, and people loved him more for it, not less. This April he said he was cancer free.
Which is what makes the shape of this week so strange. Three months ago the news out of Otago was good news. His family used the word blessed about it in the same breath as the word sudden, and both of those words are carrying a lot of weight.
For most of the planet, the face belongs to a paleontologist in a battered hat. Dr. Alan Grant walked into “Jurassic Park” in 1993 as a man who would rather dig up a bone than sit near a child, and walked back out of it as everybody’s favorite grown-up. He returned for “Jurassic Park III” in 2001, then once more for “Jurassic World Dominion” in 2022, three decades after the first one.
Part of why that role stuck is how ordinary he let Grant be. He didn’t play a hero. He played a slightly tired, slightly grumpy scientist who reacts to a sixty-foot animal roughly the way you or I would, which is to say badly, and then gets on with the job of keeping two kids alive. Children believed him. That is a very hard trick.
He was born on September 14, 1947, in Omagh, Northern Ireland. His family moved to New Zealand while he was still a boy, and New Zealand kept him. Every outlet that wrote about him this week called him a New Zealand actor, which is exactly how he would have wanted the sentence to read.
The breakthrough was “Sleeping Dogs” in 1977. Close to five decades of work came after it, and the list refuses to sit in one genre. “The Piano.” “The Hunt for Red October.” “Merlin.” “The Tudors.” “Peaky Blinders.” He could be the warm one, the cold one, the funny one, the quietly frightening one, and he moved between them without ever seeming to strain.
And underneath all of it, the whole time, there was the farm.
Two Paddocks is a vineyard in Central Otago, on the South Island, and Sam Neill founded it and ran it himself. Not as a celebrity hobby with a hired manager and a nice label. He was out in it. He put the way it worked into one sentence: “My life in acting was always a counterbalance to my life on the farm.”
Read that again and it tells you which one he considered the day job.
Which brings us back to the ram. Naming your livestock after your friends and co-stars is not a bit somebody thought up for a press tour. It is what a man does when he finds the world genuinely funny and wants to keep his people near him while he works. A cow named Helena Bonham Carter is a joke that only pays off in private, on a hillside, with nobody watching.
Laura Dern, who first stood beside him in a Montana dig site in 1993 and has been in his life ever since, gave Deadline a goodbye that stopped a lot of people in their tracks. She called him “my beloved lifetime friend.” Then she said this: “He showed me the depths of loyalty, protectiveness and love always with the driest of wit. He was a true and noble gentleman, wrapped up in my dream leading man.”
Loyalty. Protectiveness. The driest of wit. Every word in that sentence matches the man who named a cow after her.
In 2022 he was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, which is about as formal as anything ever got with him. He kept posting from the vineyard. He kept the wine going. He kept working, right up to the last stretch.
Seventy-eight years, close to five decades in front of a camera, a knighthood, three trips back to the island with the dinosaurs, and a hillside in Otago where the animals are named after people he loved.
The vines are still there. So is the ram.
