Sam Neill - Biography

Name: Sam Neill

Born: 14 September 1947 (Age: 62)

Where: Omagh, Northern Ireland

Height: 6'

Awards: 3 Golden Globe nominations

Before the advent of Russell Crowe, Sam Neill was the only New Zealand film star of worldwide note. And it's fair to assume that - given his extraordinary consistency, his unerring ability to play loveable action heroes, psychotic authoritarians, damaged everymen and even the Antichrist himself - Neill will still be around when Crowe is known only as that Roman general with the disappearing dog.

Neill's career has been long, remarkably varied, and marked - like that of Geoffrey Rush - by a loyalty to the Antipodean film industry that made him. He was born Nigel Neill on the 14th of September, 1947. His dad, Dermot, was a third-generation New Zealander, whose family ran Neill And Co, one of the biggest booze wholesalers on the islands. Like many of the Neills, Dermot was a military man (it's rumoured that his great-granddad helped burn down the White House in 1812). He'd attended Harrow in the UK, then Sandhurst military academy, where he met his wife, an Englishwoman named Priscilla. They bore one son, Michael, then were stationed in Northern Ireland, in Omagh, where Nigel and a further daughter were born. In 1954, the family returned to New Zealand, Dermot moving into the family business.

It was in New Zealand that Nigel became Sam. There were a fair few Nigels at school in Dunedin, and it wasn't a good name to have - "a little effete for the rigours of a New Zealand playground", recalls Neill, who also stammered at the time. He got the nickname Sam, and clung to it. He attended the Anglican boys' school Christ College, in Christchurch, studied conscientiously, and won a place at Canterbury University, studying English. He'd always been interested in film, recalling being first affected by Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, but here he began to involve himself in Drama. He took no formal acting classes, he was just good at it and interested in the whole process, and was encouraged by both his teachers and famous novelist Dame Ngaio Marsh, who put on a Shakespeare production each year.

Scoring a BA in English, Neill took to the road, spending a year criss-crossing the islands in a minibus with the Players Drama Quartet. He then joined the New Zealand National Film Unit in Wellington and, for the next six years, grounded himself in film-making, as an editor, a writer, a narrator and eventually the director of documentaries. He covered skiing, windsurfing (his Surf Sail concerning the first crossing of the Cook Strait by windsurfers), his great love architecture, and also the theatre troupe Red Mole. All the while he was acting too, in fringe productions and short films.

Landfall concerned a collapsing back-to-the-Earth commune, while Ashes, based on TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday, saw him as a priest tortured by his wavering faith.

. 1977 saw him star in Sleeping Dogs, the first New Zealand film ever to be released in America. Directed by Roger Donaldson (who'd go on to make Mel Gibson's The Bounty and Kevin Costner's excellent No Way Out), it was a fine star vehicle, like Romper Stomper would be for Crowe. In it, Neill played a recluse reluctantly drawn into a struggle between a fascistic government and an ultraviolent resistance movement. He was tremendous, his performance being noted by Australian casting director Margaret Fink who had him audition for an upcoming movie called My Brilliant Career. Getting the part, Neill returned home and, that very day, resigned from his job and put his house up for sale. Within two weeks, he was gone. He would not work in New Zealand again for 14 years.

With Australian cinema enjoying a renaissance, My Brilliant Career was the launch-pad for Neill. Judy Davis stole the show as a bright, sassy young woman battling for her independence in Australia at the turn of the 20th Century, but Neill did well, and decided to pursue acting full-time. He got TV work in long-running series like The Sullivans and Young Ramsay, starred in the news comedy The Journalist and played the poor lover of another feisty female in Lucinda Brayford. But My Brilliant Career was still slowly winning hearts across the globe, and one admirer was lauded Brit thespian James Mason who was knocked out by Neill's efforts. He not only recommended Neill for the part of Damien Thorne in The Final Conflict: Omen III, but also offered him a ticket to London. He was also no doubt thinking of Sam as a potential co-star in an upcoming adaptation of Ivanhoe..

So Sam was The Beast, and a thrillingly slick and vicious Beast at that. His horribly intense and malignant stare made him perhaps the only actor who might have convinced as the grown-up version of the spooky little kid in The Omen. He also managed to charm his co-star, Lisa Harrow, also a New Zealander, and star of It Shouldn't Happen to A Vet and, later, John Thaw's wife in Kavanagh QC. The pair would have a son, Tim, but split before the Eighties were out.

Having hit big as Damien, Neill's next series of roles played on this not a jot. There was more unpleasantness in the deeply disturbing Possession, but here Neill played the bewildered husband of Isabelle Adjani as she creates (and actually has sex with!) a massive, lizard-like demon lover. Then came From A Far Country, a biopic of the Pope, Ivanhoe, and Enigma, a spy thriller set behind the Iron Curtain, where Neill played Dimitri Vasilikov - the first of many roles where he'd play a strict Eastern European autocrat. Gives good authority, does Sam.

Now, the Antichrist aside, came Neill's first real taste of fame.

First, still living in England, he was Reilly, Ace Of Spies, in a hugely popular TV show that won him a Golden Globe nomination and nearly got him the role of James Bond when Roger Moore finally hung up his Beretta. Neill would be mentioned each time the role became subsequently available. Then came Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer's tale of corporate warfare, Neill playing a rich, aristocratic Wall Street superstar fighting it out with formerly dirt-poor Polish hotel magnate Peter Strauss. It was a mighty hit, and led to some prime film roles. There was Plenty and A Cry In The Dark (a dingo ate my baby!), both with Meryl Streep and director Fred Schepisi. There was more Russkie beastliness, as Colonel Andrei Denisov in the mini-series Amerika, where the USA has been taken over by the Soviets (boo! hiss!). And he was Lafayette in The French Revolution.

. It just kept getting better. Next came Dead Calm, the film that broke Nicole Kidman. Here Neill played her distressed husband, desperately trying to save the day when nut-job Billy Zane kidnaps both Kidman AND Neill's boat. It was a superb thriller, boosting its stars big-time, but it brought personal benefits too. Noriko Watanabe had been a make-up artist on A Cry In The Dark, but got to know Neill while working on Dead Calm. Noriko already had a daughter, Maiko, and she would bear another, Elena, for Neill. The couple married in 1989, and are still together today, Noriko having worked on many of Sam's films, as well as such hits as Muriel's Wedding and My Best Friend's Wedding. They have homes in Beverly Hills and New Zealand, but reside mostly in Sydney.

Neill now entered an extraordinary period. He was yet another stern Russian, Commander Vasili Borodin, chasing sub-thief Sean Connery in Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October. He paired up with Judy Davis again, getting another Golden Globe nomination for his part in the French Resistance thriller One Against The Wind (also featuring a very young Kate Beckinsale). There was Memoirs Of An Invisible Man, where he forged a firm friendship with director John Carpenter. And then came 1993, when he lived the actor's dream. He was Dr Alan Grant, fleeing things that should not be, in Steven Spielberg's original Jurassic Park, and he balanced this blockbuster with the arty, testing and beautiful The Piano, which was ALSO a massive hit. He fled well but, as Holly Hunter's morose, misunderstanding husband Alisdair Stewart in The Piano, he was wonderful. He accepted the Palme D'Or at Cannes on behalf of director Jane Campion. For his efforts and certainly NOT for all the nasty Communists he'd played, Sam was awarded an OBE for services to acting that same year, four days before his father died of cancer.

Neill now chose some genuinely interesting projects, as befits a man who has more than paid his dues.

He did Sirens with Hugh Grant, played a super-sinister bandit going after Willem Dafoe in Joseph Conrad's Victory, and starred as King Charles II, alongside Robert Downey Jr in the excellent period piece Restoration (excellent if you discount Meg Ryan's silly attempt to be mad). He joined up with Carpenter again for In The Mouth Of Madness, tracking down missing author Sutter Kane whose books make people hit each other with axes. He was Kristen Scott-Thomas's husband in The Horse Whisperer, Sigourney Weaver's in Snow White: A Tale Of Terror, and starred alongside Helena Bonham Carter in the blackly amusing Revengers' Comedies. There was the much-praised, space-set fright-fest Event Horizon, and Merlin where, in the title role, Neill took on Bonham Carter's Morgan and Miranda Richardson's fabulous Queen Mab and eventually lived a lovely forever with Isabella Rossellini. Not bad work if you can get it. Merlin was a monster, earning a 37 million rating for NBC, the best miniseries rating in 14 years and the best for a film since Neill's own Jurassic Park. Neill was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Emmy.

. In the meantime, throughout the mid-to-late Eighties, Neill had given something back to the Antipodes. He starred alongside Jon Voight in The Rainbow Warrior, as a police chief coming to discover that it was the FRENCH, damn them, who blew up Greenpeace's boat. In the mockumentary Children Of The Revolution, with both Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis, he expounded the theory that Stalin spent his last night with a young Australian woman, their love-child later bringing Australia to the brink of Civil War. He worked with Peter Jackson (now making Lord Of The Rings) on another spoof documentary, Forgotten Silver, about a "long lost" pioneer of the New Zealand film industry. And he returned to his past - New Zealand and real documentary-making - with Cinema Of Unease, which traced the evolution of the New Zealand industry. This formed part of the BFI's Century Of Cinema series, other directors including Martin Scorsese, Stephen Frears and Jean-Luc Godard.

After 25 years in the business, Sam Neill was still on top. The Dish, concerning a bunch of Aussies controlling the only satellite link to Neil Armstrong's moon-mission, was one of Australia's biggest ever hits. And then there was Jurassic Park 3, the first time Neill had reprised a film role - a guaranteed monster, if ever there was one. It was that balance again - low budget excellence and blockbusting epics. Neill moved on to The Zookeeper which saw him stay behind to look after the animals in a zoo when yet another Balkans crisis goes off, then went epic once more with the enormous Andrew Davies-adapted TV miniseries Doctor Zhivago. He'd follow this with Dirty Deeds, playing a bent cop involved in a struggle between thug Bryan Brown and Chicago hood John Goodman over the slot machine business in 1969 Sydney. And then it was back to New Zealand for the kidnap thriller Perfect Strangers.

After two low-budget films in a row, it came as no surprise to hear all the rumours concerning Spielberg returning to direct him in Jurassic Park 4.

. Sam Neill won't be going away, just picking his projects and, meanwhile, making a success of his Two Paddocks Pinot Noir, his vineyard being in the Gibbston Valley, Otago. Not only does this stick with Neill family tradition, but also makes a mint. The 1997 vintage was so popular that none was left for export. Everything, but EVERYTHING goes this guy's way.

Dominic Wills