Sam Neill’s ex-partner has shed light on his cause of death, revealing that the Jurassic Park star had been “pretty sick” for the past fortnight.
The Australian journalist Laura Tingle, who was in a relationship with Neill from 2018 to 2021, spoke about the 78-year-old actor’s final days before his “sudden and unexpected” death on Monday (13 July).
Neill was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer in 2022, and while the actor was cancer-free at the time of his death, Tingle 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.
“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.”
Meanwhile, actor Rima Te Wiata, who co-starred with Neill in Taika Waititi’s 2016 film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, told The New Zealand Herald that the actor 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?’”
Neill’s family previously said ”more details will be shared later”, but asked for privacy to “navigate this immeasurable loss”.
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.
Neill was active right up until his death. Across his diverse career, he 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”.
“I’ve had a scan just now, and there is no cancer in my body. This is an extraordinary thing,” Neill shared.
Neill had monthly chemotherapy for the rest of his life, having signed a contract with the drug company that if he was still living after four months, the treatment would be free.
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