Sam Neill’s cause of death has been confirmed as pneumonia, two days after news broke that the beloved actor had died at 78.
Per Rolling Stone, Philip Grenz, Neill’s longtime representative, confirmed the cause in a statement shared with Entertainment Weekly on Wednesday. “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,” Grenz said.
Neill’s death came just months after he shared that he was cancer-free following a lengthy battle with lymphoma. The actor was diagnosed with stage three blood cancer in 2023. “I’m not afraid to die,” he told The Guardian at the time, “but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know?”
However, as his former partner Laura Tingle explained this week, battling “various forms of cancer for at least the last five years intensively… [took] a toll.”
“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.”
Neill built a prolific career across film and television, becoming a household name in the 1990s through roles in “The Hunt for Red October,” “The Piano,” “Jurassic Park,” “Event Horizon” and “The Horse Whisperer.” He remained best known to global audiences as palaeontologist Alan Grant across the “Jurassic Park” franchise.
Tributes flowed in from across the industry following news of his death. He was celebrated by his “Jurassic Park” family as well as celebrities across the industry. Steven Spielberg praised him as “exceptionally collaborative,” saying: “I adored making all the ‘Jurassic’ movies with him. Along with Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, we will always have our ‘Jurassic’ family and Sam will never be forgotten by us or his many millions of fans around the world.”
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Fellow actors including Nicole Kidman, Cillian Murphy, Jeff Goldblum, and more also paid tribute.