‘He made wine and he shared it. What more do you want?’: Sam Neill remembered by his co-stars

Lindsay Duncan, co-star, Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983) and Blackbird (2019)

I worked with Sam on Reilly when I was young and shy and even though I was pinned over a desk by him in one scene, I didn’t really make the most of the experience. Then a few years ago we did a film called Blackbird, directed by Roger Michell, with an amazing bunch of actors and we all became close. Sam was a gorgeous man. He was a wonderful actor. He was warm and funny. He listened when you talked. He made wine and he shared it. What more do you want from a guy?

When Sam was going through a particularly hard phase of treatment, the Blackbird group decided he needed cheering up. After much deep thought from us all and the exchange of many hilarious images, Mia Wasikowska commissioned a cake from a friend of hers which was a pig and a sheep involved in an intimate act, with a bottle of Two Paddocks next to them, on its side. Just a few of the things he loved, in one cake. We all have tattoos of a little Blackbird, so that will go with him.

‘He wasn’t tarnished by cardinal ambition’

Charles Dance, co-star, Plenty (1985), To the Ends of the Earth (2005) and And Then There Were None (2015)

In an industry that’s full of quite dubious people, Sam was one of the good guys. He was a wonderful, unfussy actor with immense charm who was also incredibly handsome. I always got the impression he was really balanced. There must have been occasions when he was anxious and insecure and paranoid, but it wasn’t ever apparent. He was just a very cool guy.

Sam was always far more interested in the quality of his wine than in any awards for acting. When we wrapped filming on And Then There Were None, he gave us all some of the very, very good pinot noir from his winery, which he was very proud of. Between jobs, he would disappear back to New Zealand. He wasn’t tarnished by that kind of cardinal ambition that is rife in our industry – but nor was he complacent. He just took life as it came.

When he was diagnosed with cancer, and led to believe he might only have six months, I sent him an email saying: “Good luck, Sam, come on, you can get through this.” He wrote back saying: “Great to hear from you mate!” With him, what you saw was what you got. I think that was one of the reasons he inspired so much affection. In this business, all of us – however much we’d deny it – have public and private faces. Sam had the same face in both places. I really wish I’d spent more time with him, because that little time I did spend with him was so rewarding.

‘He was fascinated by the cytotoxic venom of the puff adder’

Peter Webber, director, Tutankhamun (2016)

I first wanted to cast Sam because of the magnificently creepy Andrzej ?u?awski movie Possession, in which he starred opposite Isabelle Adjani. That performance – strangely operatic and exaggerated yet deeply troubling, obsessive, damaged – stayed with me for years. I finally got to work with him on a television series in South Africa, and I spent the rest of the shoot badgering him for anecdotes between takes. He had a fine sense of comedy and although he was a complicated man, he wasn’t grand or starry. No ego on set. No fuss. Just the work. And a wicked sense of humour.

It reached almost 50 degrees in Vioolsdrift, on the border with Namibia, but Sam relished the challenge and never indulged in the tantrums and starry nonsense you sometimes find in actors of his age and experience. He was playing the English aristocrat Lord Carnarvon: he mined the humour in the character, finding light and shade where it wasn’t always apparent on the page.

It was a long shoot in sometimes challenging conditions – battling sandstorms, scorpions, poisonous spiders and the occasional puff adder. Sam was fascinated by these snakes and the danger of their bite, which he would describe with absolute relish. Puff adder venom is cytotoxic – it dissolves tissue. The flesh dies and sloughs away, sometimes down to the bone. You can develop necrotising fasciitis on top of everything – the flesh-eating disease – requiring multiple surgeries to cut away the dead tissue. Sam would recount all of this at length, over dinner, with the kind of glee most people reserve for describing a good wine, then pause, take a sip of his own, and say something like, “Anyway, lovely sunset tonight.”

He was a bon viveur, Sam. Proud of his New Zealand roots and the vineyard he owned there, which he talked about the way other actors talk about their craft – with genuine love and absolutely no pretension.

He could also be a terror. We moved the shoot to Cape Town – much more comfortable, but slightly dull after the madness of the desert. Sam leavened the tedium of shooting pages and pages of dialogue a day with a series of increasingly elaborate practical jokes. He convinced a poor young actor that the scene required a big mouthful of cake right at the top. Plausible enough. She believed him. Twenty takes later – wide, medium, close-up – the poor woman was still forcing spoonful after spoonful into her mouth. Eyes watering. Cheeks like a hamster. The whole crew were in on it by take three. Sam never cracked. That was the thing about him – he could hold a dead straight face while someone two feet away was slowly drowning in sponge cake. She only realised when she caught us all trying not to laugh. Even then, Sam looked genuinely baffled as to what the problem was.

You kept your guard up around him. He was always setting something up, quietly, patiently. But it was never cruel. It was generous. He made everyone on set feel like they were in on the joke, even when they were the joke.

A fine actor. A finer man. I’ll miss him.