He defied dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and razor-wielding thugs in Peaky Blinders, but Sam Neill may have beaten his greatest challenge yet by holding his own in a secret battle against blood cancer.
The 75-year-old star reveals in an upcoming autobiography his utter shock when diagnosed in March 2022 with “a ferocious” case of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
His cancer is now in remission, but it was no easy victory as he was plunged into a battle that has been both physical and mental.
His first thought, “I’m crook, I’m dying.” His second, to pen a memoir before the cancer could bring down the curtain on a career that has spanned almost half a century as has seen him star in more than 70 movies.
His outlook was so bleak that the initial working title he chose for his life’s story was ‘Notes from a Dying Man’.
All his own work
“I thought I need to do something, and I thought, ‘Shall I start writing?'” he told the BBC.
“I didn’t think I had a book in me, I just thought I’d write some stories. And I found it increasingly engrossing.
“A year later, not only have I written the book – I didn’t have a ghost writer – but it’s come out in record time.
“I suspect my publishers, they’re delightful people, but I think they wanted to get it out in a hurry just in case I kicked the bucket before it was time to release the thing.”
His memoir, now with the more upbeat title Did I Ever Tell You This?, gave him a reason “to get through the day” as he endured rounds of chemotherapy and wondered if the grueling treatments were coming too late.
His hair fell out almost immediately upon beginning treatment, and he writes candidly of how looking the mirror was an ordeal when “a bald, wizened old man” stared back at him.
“More than anything I want my beard back. I don’t like the look of my face one bit,” he jokes.
It wasn’t death itself that scared him, he explains, but “what I don’t want to do is to stop living, because I really enjoy living.”
“I’ve regarded it as an adventure, quite a dark adventure, but an adventure nevertheless. And the good days are just fantastic and when you get some good news it’s absolutely exhilarating.”
The New Zealand-born star stresses that he has not written a typical I-beat-cancer diary, saying that he “can’t stand cancer books.”
Instead there are ruminations on the flaws of today’s young actors, who he accuses of “whispering and mumbling” because they leave it to modern recording equipment to capture their lines rather than speak them clearly.
“I think it’s a thing that a lot of young actors have that it’s kind of sexy to have a whispering kind of thing that no one else can hear,” he said.
“It’s ridiculous. We speak so we can be understood. We don’t go around mumbling because someone has hung a microphone around our necks.”
And that’s not his only gripe about fellow actors, with his autobiography taking a few random shots at co-stars.
Dishing the dirt
Harvey Keitel, he writes, was “truculent and difficult and a bit graceless” white filming The Piano.
But his most pointed barb is reserved for Judy Davis, with whom he starred in three films, including My Brilliant Career, and who “made it clear I wasn’t in her league.”
Neill’s cancer still involves ongoing treatments, but he’s heartened by his tumours’ shrinking and eager to go before the cameras with Annette Bening in a movie to be shot in Australia this year.
“The last thing I want is for people to obsess about the cancer thing,” says Neill, “because I’m not really interested in cancer.
“I’m not really interested in anything other than living.”
