Nigel John Dermot Neill was born on 14 September 1947 in Omagh, Northern Ireland, and moved with his family to New Zealand in the early 1950s, according to NBC News. He picked up the nickname Sam at school and kept it for the rest of his life, holding both British and New Zealand citizenship.

He grew up in the South Island, studied English literature at university and found his way into film through documentary work rather than drama school. That route shaped a career that ran to more than 150 screen credits across five decades. His family announced in July 2026 that he had died suddenly in Sydney, aged 78, as reported by Al Jazeera and NPR.

Neill’s early working years were spent making documentaries in New Zealand before he moved in front of the camera. His breakout came in Roger Donaldson’s thriller Sleeping Dogs in 1977, in which he played a man on the run; NZ On Screen describes it as the role that made his name, and Al Jazeera notes it was the first New Zealand feature film in more than a decade.

Australian cinema then provided the next step. Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) put him opposite Judy Davis, and the attention it drew led to his first major studio part, the adult Damien Thorn in Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981).

International recognition arrived with the 1983 television serial Reilly, Ace of Spies, in which he played the real-life agent Sidney Reilly, according to NBC News. The series made him a familiar face in Britain and the United States and opened the door to Hollywood.

Over the following decade he built one of the most varied filmographies of his generation: A Cry in the Dark opposite Meryl Streep, the thriller Dead Calm with Nicole Kidman, and a Soviet submarine officer in The Hunt for Red October (1990). Then came 1993, when he played palaeontologist Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park and the repressed settler Alisdair Stewart in Jane Campion’s The Piano in the same year.

Jurassic Park became the biggest commercial success of his career. Box Office Mojo records a worldwide gross of about $978 million from the original 1993 release and more than $1.1 billion across all releases, on a production budget of $63 million.

The Piano won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, giving Neill the rare distinction of starring in the year’s most celebrated art film and its biggest blockbuster. He returned as Grant for Jurassic Park III in 2001 and again for Jurassic World Dominion in 2022, which grossed about $1 billion worldwide according to Box Office Mojo.

Television kept him busy late into his career, from Cardinal Wolsey in The Tudors to Inspector Chester Campbell in Peaky Blinders, and in 2016 he was the gruff foster uncle in Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople, one of New Zealand’s most popular home-grown films.

Neill was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1991 and a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2007, and he received one Emmy nomination and three Golden Globe nominations, according to NBC News.

He had declined the title when knighthoods were restored in New Zealand in 2009, but in 2022 he accepted redesignation as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to film, as recorded by the Governor-General of New Zealand and reported by 1News. New Zealand’s prime minister, Christopher Luxon, described him as one of the greats who took New Zealand stories to the world, according to Al Jazeera.

Neill did not build a commercial endorsement portfolio in the way many screen stars do. His most visible promotional work was for his own wine, and he became an effective ambassador for Central Otago Pinot Noir through tastings, interviews and social media videos filmed on the farm.

His 2023 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, published by Text Publishing, covered his childhood, his film career and his life in Central Otago. Its sales figures and his advance have not been published.

Neill’s main business was wine. He founded Two Paddocks in 1993 with a first vineyard in the Gibbston Valley of Central Otago, released the first vintage in 1997 and added a Bannockburn site on Felton Road in 2013, according to the winery’s own history at Two Paddocks. All of the vineyards are certified organic, and the company concentrates on Pinot Noir and Riesling.

The estate grew into four vineyards across Central Otago’s main valleys. Two Paddocks lists the original 4.6-hectare First Paddock, the 2-hectare Last Chance vineyard near Alexandra, the Red Bank farm and vineyard that serves as headquarters, and the 6-hectare Fusilier block in Bannockburn. Neill ran it as proprietor with family and friends and was well known for describing the business as time- and money-consuming rather than a source of easy profit.

Apart from the vineyards, Neill’s most documented asset was property. 1News reported that he bought a home in Double Bay, Sydney, in 1996 for A$839,000 and sold it in 2020 for a price believed to be above A$3.6 million, and that he also kept a property in Wellington.

Red Bank, near Alexandra, was both a working farm and his base. It carries orchards, organic vegetables and livestock, according to Two Paddocks, and Neill became known for naming his animals after film-industry friends, as 1News noted. The land and vines are the largest items in his estate, but their value has not been independently published.