Dr. Alan Grant did not like children, did not trust computers, and did not believe, even after the raptors and the brachiosaurus had made his skepticism obsolete, that dinosaurs and human beings belonged on the same island. He was the rare blockbuster hero who spent much of his own franchise being proven right about how badly the whole enterprise would go, saved less by bravado than by a weary, watchful decency that made audiences trust him anyway. That same mixture of doubt and quiet moral seriousness ran through the 50 years of work turned in by the actor who played him. Sam Neill, who died July 13 at his home in Sydney at the age of 78, spent his career being the smartest, wariest person in rooms full of submarines, storms, spies, and dinosaurs, and somehow made wariness look like a virtue.
He was born Nigel John Dermot Neill in Omagh, Northern Ireland, in 1947, the son of a British Army officer from a New Zealand family and an English mother. The family returned to New Zealand when he was 7, and Neill grew up in Christchurch, attending Christ’s College before studying English literature at the University of Canterbury, where he first acted in student theater. He joined the National Film Unit, New Zealand’s state documentary agency, in the early 1970s, learning the craft from the ground up as a trainee and director before landing his first substantial screen role in the 1977 thriller Sleeping Dogs, a film that helped announce a New Zealand film industry the world had barely noticed existed.Neill’s international rise came through Australia and Britain rather than Hollywood. He starred opposite Judy Davis in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), then, in 1983, played the master spy Sidney Reilly in the British miniseries Reilly, Ace of Spies, a performance so controlled and magnetic that it earned him a Golden Globe nomination and a reputation in Europe that Hollywood eventually noticed. He appeared in Andrzej Zulawski’s cult horror film Possession (1981) and starred alongside Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark (1988), based on the Azaria Chamberlain case. Then came the run that made him a movie star in the conventional sense: the taut three-hander Dead Calm (1989), opposite a young Nicole Kidman, and The Hunt for Red October (1990), in which Neill’s doomed Soviet first officer gave the submarine thriller its moral center.
