'Jurassic Park' actor Sam Neill dies at age 78

Sam Neill Disclosure New Zealand actor Sam Neill, known for the film "Jurassic Park", died this Monday (13), in Sydney, Australia. The information was confirmed by his family in a statement on their social networks. "It is with immense sadness that Sam Neill's family announces his passing," the note opens. "Sam was surrounded by his family and left with the dignity that marked his entire life. The loss was sudden and unexpected, but there was comfort in knowing that Sam remained cancer-free," the statement said.

He had recently reported that he had recovered from cancer after five years of treatment. According to him, the remission was possible thanks to a gene therapy that modified his immune system. In 2023, Neill wrote in his memoir that he was “possibly dying” after being diagnosed with stage three non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In an interview shown over the weekend on Channel 7 in Australia, the actor said that he lived with the disease for five years and that chemotherapy treatment stopped having an effect. “I was disoriented and felt like I was leaving, which obviously wasn’t ideal,” he said. Neill then underwent a therapy known as CAR-T, which uses the patient's own defense cells, modified in the laboratory, to attack cancer. "I just had a CT scan and I don't have cancer. It's something extraordinary," he said. The actor also called on Australian federal and state governments to increase funding for this type of treatment for patients with the disease in the country. With a career that began in the 1970s, Sam Neill had dozens of works in film and TV, including the series "Peaky Blinders" and the film "The Piano".

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