Sam Neill had been steadily working in the movies for nearly two decades before he became, at the age of 45, a star in the industry’s eyes. A sturdy, reliable everyman who radiated, depending on the role, a kind of quietly masculine decency or a steely chill, the New Zealander never chased the flashy, all-guns-blazing lead roles. Indeed, through the early years of his career, he did much of his best work as a selfless supporting pillar for various female tour de force turns: Judy Davis in “My Brilliant Career,” Isabelle Adjani in “Possession,” Nicole Kidman in “Dead Calm” and Meryl Streep in “Plenty” and “A Cry in the Dark.” His performances in all those films were intelligent, carefully etched and modulated so as to throw all the spotlight on his co-star; if he wasn’t yet a household name, that very humility had him much in demand.
Yet when a pair of career-defining roles in 1993 launched him to the A-list, it wasn’t through a notable change in tack. As paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park,” he was finally first-billed in a Hollywood mega-blockbuster, playing a macho hero type with his own accompanying action figure — but Neill knew as well as anyone that he was still playing second banana to a horde of dazzlingly rendered dinosaurs. With those creature effects always set to be the film’s primary selling point, Spielberg and Universal didn’t need a ready-made star for what producer Kathleen Kennedy at the time conceded “isn’t an intensely complicated part.” Neill was professional and affordable and wouldn’t pull focus; he was perfect.
Yet “Jurassic Park” was the kind of cultural colossus that threatened to make him a Hollywood leading man in spite of himself — even if, in a Los Angeles Times interview at the time, he shrugged off the idea, claiming that Spielberg’s film may have given him “a little more leverage,” but he continued to have “this penchant for small films — my agents complain about it from time to time — because I like to play a lot of different things.”
One of those small films was “The Piano,” by his compatriot Jane Campion, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes just as “Jurassic Park” was hitting theaters. In it, Neill was no hero. As the violently abusive, cuckolded husband of Holly Hunter’s mute mail-order bride in Campion’s colonial-era erotic fable, he was the stiff, priggish counterpoint to the liberated, sensual masculinity embodied in the film by Harvey Keitel. It was an unflattering, potentially thankless part that Neill played with a petty, almost poignantly impotent rage, and a fascinating performance to be doing the rounds while, over on the other side of the world, Neill was being fashioned as a Hollywood action man.
Once again, he was a lucky charm for his female co-star: Hunter won the Oscar for her brilliantly anguished, intuitive turn, and while “The Piano” received eight nominations overall, there was none for him. Not that he was bothered. Years later, he wrote that he regarded Campion’s “important feminist film” as being like “a medal on my chest”: “It’s a film that will always have a place in cinema history. And I served in it.”
It’s a statement that encapsulates Neill’s approach to his career. He’d never headline a hit on the scale of “Jurassic Park” again, but that film and its sequels enabled him to take more profitable, unmemorable paycheck roles than he might otherwise have been offered. And those in turn gave him the liberty to pursue unusual, intimate projects with gifted collaborators (from John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness” to Sally Potter’s “Yes” to Warwick Thornton’s “Sweet Country” to Taika Waititi’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople”) in which his own performance was less important than the artistic whole. In later years, unlikely social media fame — for posts showcasing his wry sense of humor and down-home love of nature — would seal his reputation as one of the industry’s nice guys. As a screen presence, however, he was more interesting and unpredictable than that.
