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New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who starred as Dr. Alan Grant in the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park and its 2022 sequel, Jurassic World Dominion, died on Monday in Sydney, Australia. He was 78.
While American audiences likely know Neill best for Jurassic Park, he had a long and varied career in film and television. His sheer versatility won him fans around the world. He played the grown Damien in Omen III: The Final Conflict; a Russian officer in The Hunt for Red October; and even made brief cameos (as an actor playing Odin in a theatrical troupe) in Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder. (The less said about 1997’s space horror travesty, Event Horizon, the better, although it has its fans, and Neill made the most of his role.) Yet some of his best performances were in smaller, critically acclaimed independent films such as 1993’s Oscar-winning The Piano.
On television, Neill earned his first Golden Globe nomination for the lead role in Reilly, Ace of Spies in the 1980s. He was nominated for both an Emmy and a second Golden Globe for playing the titular Arthurian wizard in the 1998 miniseries Merlin. He played Cardinal Wolsley in The Tudors, and was part of the ensemble cast in the (excellent) 2015 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Neill was magnetic as the ruthless CI Major Chester Campbell in Peaky Blinders—an antagonist and romantic rival of Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby.
