Northern Ireland

Neill was born on 14 September 1947 in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, to Priscilla Beatrice (née Ingham) and Dermot Neill. His father, an army officer, was a second-generation New Zealander, while his mother was English.^[7]

His great-grandfather Percival "Percy" Neill left Belfast, Ireland, and moved to Melbourne, Australia, joining a firm of merchants. Four years later, in 1863, he moved to New Zealand, settling in Dunedin. He was the son of a wine merchant importing wine from France.^[8][9][10]

At the time of Neill's birth, his father was stationed in Northern Ireland, serving with the Royal Irish Fusiliers.^[11] His father's family owned Neill and Co. (later part of the listed hospitality group Wilson Neill).^[12][13]

New Zealand

In 1954, Neill moved with his family to New Zealand, where he attended the Anglican boys' boarding school Christ's College, Christchurch. He went on to study English literature at the University of Canterbury, where he had his first exposure to acting. He moved to Wellington to continue his tertiary education at Victoria University, where he graduated with a BA in English literature.

In 2004, on the Australian talk show Enough Rope, interviewer Andrew Denton briefly touched on the topic of Neill's stuttering. He recalled how deeply it had affected him in his life and, as a result, he often found himself "hoping that people wouldn't talk to [him]" so he would not have to answer. He also stated, "I kind of outgrew it. I can still ... you can still detect me as a stammerer."^[14]

He first took to calling himself "Sam" at school because there were several other students named Nigel, and because he felt the name Nigel was "a little effete for ... a New Zealand playground".^[14][15][16]

New Zealand

Stills from Landfall – A Film About Ourselves (1974)

Neill's first film was a New Zealand television film The City of No (1971). He followed it with a short, The Water Cycle (1972) and the television film Hunt's Duffer (1973). Neill wrote and directed a film for the New Zealand National Film Unit, Telephone Etiquette (1974). He also appeared in Landfall (1975).^[17]

Neill's breakthrough performance in New Zealand was the film Sleeping Dogs (1977), the first local film to be widely screened abroad.

Australia

Neill went to Australia where he had a guest role on the TV show The Sullivans. He was the romantic male lead in My Brilliant Career (1979), opposite Judy Davis, which was a big international success.

He made some Australian films that were less widely seen: The Journalist (1979), Just Out of Reach (1979) and Attack Force Z (1981), and appeared in television productions such as Young Ramsay and Lucinda Brayford.

International career

Neill at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival

In 1981, he won his first big international role, as Damien Thorn, son of the devil, in Omen III: The Final Conflict;^[18] also in that year, he played an outstanding main role in Andrzej Żuławski's cult film Possession.^[18]

The 1982 film of Ivanhoe made Neill a local celebrity in Sweden, where it has been aired on SVT every New Years Day for 40 years.^[19]

He was one of the leading candidates to succeed Roger Moore in the role of James Bond, but lost out to Timothy Dalton. Among his many Australian roles is playing Michael Chamberlain in Evil Angels (1988) (released as A Cry in the Dark outside of Australia and New Zealand),^[20] a film about the case of Azaria Chamberlain.

Neill has played heroes and occasionally villains in a succession of film and television dramas and comedies. In the UK, he won early fame and was Golden Globe nominated after portraying real-life spy, Sidney Reilly, in the mini-series Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983). An early American starring role was in 1987's Amerika, playing a senior KGB officer leading the occupation and division of a defeated United States. His leading and co-starring roles in films include the thriller Dead Calm (1989),^[18] the two-part historical epic La Révolution française (1989) (as Marquis de Lafayette), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Death in Brunswick (1990),^[18] Jurassic Park (1993), Sirens (1994), The Jungle Book (1994), John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1995), Event Horizon (1997), Bicentennial Man (1999), the comedy The Dish (2000),^[18] and Jurassic Park III (2001).

Neill has occasionally acted in New Zealand films, including The Piano (1993), Perfect Strangers (2003), Under the Mountain (2009), and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). He returned to directing in 1995 with the documentary Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam Neill (1995) which he wrote and directed with Judy Rymer.

In 1993, he co-starred with Anne Archer in Question of Faith, an independent drama based on a true story about one woman's fight to beat cancer and have a baby. In 2000, he provided the voice of Sam Sawnoff in The Magic Pudding. In 2001, he hosted and narrated a documentary series for the BBC entitled Space (Hyperspace in the United States).

He portrayed the eponymous wizard in Merlin (1998), a miniseries based on the legends of King Arthur. He reprised his role in the sequel, Merlin's Apprentice (2006).

Neill starred in the historical drama The Tudors, playing Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. "I have to say I really enjoyed making The Tudors", he said,^[21] "It was six months with a character that I found immensely intriguing, with a cast that I liked very much and with a story I found very compelling. It has elements that are hard to beat: revenge and betrayal, lust and treason, all the things that make for good stories."^[21]

Neill at Burghound Asia in Singapore in 2011

He acted in the short-lived Fox TV series Alcatraz (2012) as Emerson Hauser. He played the role of Otto Luger in the fantasy adventure film The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box^[22] (2014). He had a role in the BBC series Peaky Blinders, set in post-World War I Birmingham. He played the role of Chief Inspector Chester Campbell, a sadistic corrupt policeman, who came to clean up the town on Churchill's orders. In the 2015 BBC TV miniseries And Then There Were None, based on Agatha Christie's thriller, he played the role of General MacArthur.

In 2016, he starred in the New Zealand-made film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, directed by Taika Waititi, as well as the ITV miniseries Tutankhamun. In 2017, Neill appeared in a scene in Waititi's fantasy sequel Thor: Ragnarok, in which he portrays an actor playing Odin (as depicted by Anthony Hopkins), alongside Luke Hemsworth and Matt Damon as actors playing Thor and Loki, respectively. He portrays the same actor in Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022.

In 2018, he portrayed Mr. McGregor and also provided the voice of Tommy Brock, in Peter Rabbit. In 2019, he was cast for the role of Denis Goldberg in Escape from Pretoria; however, the role was subsequently recast with Ian Hart. In late 2019, he was announced to reprise his character of Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic World Dominion, which released in July 2022.^[23]

Film

Television

Video games