Born in Northern Ireland, raised in New Zealand, adopted by the Australian film industry as one of its own and elevated to Hollywood stardom before he was 50, the actor Sam Neill, who has died aged 78, conveyed a seen-it-all worldliness without ever seeming jaded. With his floppy fringe and amused, rueful eyes, he was a man of decency, humility and wit. “I’m just Mr Triviality, as shallow as my washbasin,” he said. “No deep glacial lakes of profundity here.” The intelligence of many of his performances suggested otherwise.
Though he was never defined by one role, it was a pair of films released in 1993 which promoted him to the A-list and showcased his versatility. In Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jurassic Park, groundbreaking in its use of computer-generated imagery, he played a palaeontologist who is awestruck to find himself among dinosaurs created from prehistoric DNA. He reprised the role in two of the film’s sequels, Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World: Dominion (2022).
