Neill the Sam

The death of Sam Neill a few weeks ago drew a surprisingly strong reaction online. He was one of those actors who was always welcome whenever he turned up. I enjoyed watching him only the week before alongside Eric Bana in the Netflix series Untamed, set in Yosemite. I first saw him in the excellent ITV series Reilly: Ace of Spies in the early ’80s, and would have seen him sooner if my family had ever watched the soapy Australian World War II drama The Sullivans, where he had his first substantial role in 1979-80. Jurassic Park wasn’t his first big movie role: he starred alongside Meryl Streep in 1989 in A Cry in the Dark (the story of the Chamberlains, which Aussies knew as Evil Angels ), and had a few more notable movie roles between the two: Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October, Until the End of the World, The Piano, and Aussie favourite Death in Brunswick. Of all the stories of him in the days after his death, my favourite was a 2015 interview snippet where he was asked “if you…