Days after Sam Neill’s family announced the actor’s “sudden and unexpected” death, his longtime representative revealed that the Jurassic Park star died from pneumonia.
Neill died in Sydney on Monday at the age of 78, three months after announcing he was cancer-free following treatment for stage three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare type of blood cancer.
Philip Grenz, who represented the New Zealand actor for 19 years, said he was issuing the clarification after speaking with Neill’s family because of “inaccuracies and outright falsehoods” in media reports about the circumstances of the actor’s death.
“As Sam Neill’s longtime rep, I spoke with his family and wish to clarify some details for his fans,” Grenz said in a statement to The Independent on Thursday. “Sam passed away from pneumonia. Prior to becoming sick, Sam had valiantly fought and beaten lymphoma through a new treatment called CAR-T therapy.”
Grenz said Neill had remained professionally active in the months before his death.
“In addition to running his award-winning winery, Two Paddocks, Sam had filmed four projects back-to-back during the past year, all of which will be released within the coming months,” he said.
He continued: “As Sam was an intensely private man who loathed a fuss, his family will honour him with a private family memorial at his farm in New Zealand at a still-undetermined later date.”
He thanked those closest to Neill for respecting the family’s privacy during what he described as “this immeasurably difficult time”.
Grenz said Neill’s whānau – the Māori word that means family – had asked people wishing to honour the actor’s memory to donate to causes he cared deeply about in lieu of sending flowers.
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They include the Dunstan Hospital Foundation in Central Otago, the Snowdome Foundation, which campaigns to improve access to blood cancer treatments including CAR-T therapy in Australia and New Zealand, and charities working to protect New Zealand’s environment and native wildlife.
On Monday, Neill’s family announced his death on Monday in a statement posted on Instagram, describing it as “sudden and unexpected”. They said the actor had remained cancer-free after being diagnosed with stage three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma in 2022 and thanked medical staff for their care in his final days.
Grenz’s statement comes after journalist Laura Tingle, who was previously in a relationship with Neill, told radio show Sydney Mornings that the cancer had “taken a toll” on his body and left his immune system “pretty compromised”.
“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,” Tingle told radio host Hamish Macdonald.
“He’d had a lot of chemo and a lot of immunotherapy and, thankfully, it had finally cleared him of the blood cancer that he’d had, but it left him pretty compromised in terms of his immune system and I think his poor body sort of got a bit exhausted, as makes sense,” she said.
Actor Rima Te Wiata, who co-starred with Neill in Taika Waititi’s 2016 film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, also told The New Zealand Herald that the actor had caught pneumonia.
“It really sucks, actually,” Te Wiata said. “I think he would be like, ‘For goodness sake, I got over my cancer. And now look, now I get pneumonia. What next?’”
Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg and stars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum led the tributes to Neill, as well as Nicole Kidman, who starred opposite the actor in the 1993 thriller Dead Calm.
Across his diverse career, Neill played everything from romantic leads to memorable villains in films such as Omen III: The Final Conflict, Possession, The Hunt for Red October, Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning drama The Piano, Event Horizon, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, The Tudors, and Peaky Blinders.
He will appear posthumously in the movies Godzilla x Kong: Supernova and The Last Resort, both expected to be released in 2027.
Neill revealed in 2023 that he had been diagnosed with stage-three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, though he later said he was in remission after undergoing treatment. He first disclosed his diagnosis in his memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, explaining that he had begun writing the book while undergoing treatment.
“I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me,” he told The Guardian in an interview ahead of its publication. “Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses, and I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big.
“But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.”
Earlier this year, he shared that CAR T-cell therapy had left him cancer-free following a clinical trial in Australia.
“I was on chemotherapy, pretty miserable business, but it was keeping me alive,” he told 7News. “Then the chemo stopped working. I was at a loss and it looked like I was on the way out, which wasn’t ideal, obviously.”
However, his condition changed after he discovered CAR T-cell therapy, a treatment that “genetically modifies patients’ blood cells”.
