If asked, most anyone would call Sam Neill’s peak period an especially rich, varied and long-lasting one — 37 years by my count.
I’m very sorry that he’s permanently hung up his hat and left the earth for cosmic parts unknown.
Neill’s career, fortified by a reliably witty, urbane, thoughtful and generally cultured attitude, was launched with Sleeping Dogs (‘77) and soldiered on with My Brilliant Career, the deeply repellent Omen III: The Final Conflict, Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, Reilly: Ace of Spies, A Cry in the Dark, Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October (‘90), Jane Campion’s The Piano, John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness, the disastrous Event Horizon, and the first two chapters of Peaky Blinders (2013 and ‘14).
But in terms of international popcorn megaplex fame and sexy, magnetic, cover-of-People-magazine smoothitude, Neill ascended to the peak of the heap with his performance as Dr. Alan Grant in Steven “beardo” Spielberg ‘s Jurassic Park (‘93), as well as the low-rent paycheck sequels (2001’s Jurassic Park III, 2022’s Jurassic World) that slightly tarnished Sam’s legacy.
