“Jurassic Park” star Sam Neill had been “pretty sick” for a couple of weeks before his death, according to his ex, Australian journalist Laura Tingle.
Tingle, who dated Neill from 2018 to 2021, was a guest on the radio show “Sydney Mornings” on Tuesday and gave more insight into the actor’s final days and years-long battle with cancer. Neill died on Monday at the age of 78, with his family saying that the loss was “sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free.” He had been battling a form of blood cancer since 2022, but revealed in April that he was cancer free.
“He’d been fighting various forms of cancer for at least the last five years intensively. And that takes a toll on anybody’s body,” Tingle told “Sydney Mornings” host Hamish Macdonald (via Entertainment Weekly).
“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 continued. “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.”
