I hope you got to see Montana.
I wrote this morning about Lindsey Graham, but I’d like to add a brief word about another unfortunate (unrelated) death. It would be a shame to let the moment slip away without some kind of comment on the late, great New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who suddenly passed away at the age of 78 over the weekend. (He had already beaten a cancer scare four years ago, but as Graham reminds us, sometimes it may just be your time one way or another.) Neill was more than just an actor – he was a fine writer besides – but his career on screen is how we’ll remember him.
And of course, most readers of any generation are by now hard-coded to remember Neill primarily from the role that unwittingly defined his career in the eyes of millions: as paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic Jurassic Park. It was my introduction to his acting, as well. (I had already devoured the Crichton novel back in 1991 — I specifically remember it as a 10-year-old’s self-conscious introduction to the world of “adult fiction” — and when I saw Neill on-screen as Grant, I felt a childlike thrill of joy: Both he and Laura Dern were exactly like the heroes I had already imagined in my mind.)
What I didn’t know at the time was that, by 1993, Neill had already had a long history of acting — all throughout the 1980s — as one of the era’s Brooding Men of Mystery. Young, thin, aristocratically handsome, and indeterminately European, Neill leaned into his natural bearing to play a host of spies and shady sorts. With his lean and hungry look, and his strangely vulpine, carefully shifting eyes, he was born to play a certain type of character: brilliant, not entirely trustworthy, and frequently teetering on the brink of insanity.
Something made Neill uniquely fit to play Russians: Older fans of U.K. spycraft may remember his career-making turn as the real-life “Sidney Reilly,” a Russian-born British intelligence agent, in Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983), or as Colonel Denisov in the ABC miniseries Amerika (1987), while the entire world recalls his small yet memorable supporting turn as Marko Ramius’s loyal First Officer Vasily Borodin in The Hunt for Red October. (I have never forgotten that Borodin’s idea of the American dream sounds strangely close to Frank Zappa’s.)
But the first time Neill was cast in the role of a spy was also probably his best, and surely the most disturbing performance of his entire career. 1981’s Possession, where Neill co-stars with a young, equally unknown Isabelle Adjani as a spy in West Berlin, dealing with a failing marriage, is singular — and I cannot hope to explain beyond that. It is a film that I can only reasonably recommend to people who are tired of having good dreams. (I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: Though I consider it a demented masterpiece, I also will never watch it again, not after getting married and having a kid.)
Possession must be noted in any retrospective about Neill because it identified early on the unique source of his strength as an actor: Few have ever more convincingly deteriorated on-screen. Neill’s intensity as a presence — the very thing that inspired Spielberg to cast him in Jurassic Park, somewhat against type, as a prickly professorial hero surviving through academic knowledge and practical skills — made him perfect as a protagonist under tension. From Possession to The Piano to John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness to even 1997’s Event Horizon, Neill enjoyed diving into roles where he played the man too tightly wound, ready to unspool should the wrong thread be yanked upon.
But that wasn’t the man himself, who always kept a healthy perspective on life. In 2023, in the midst of his fight against lymphoma, Neill reflected on the now-hovering specter of his own mortality in The Guardian: “I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses, and I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big. But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.”
Farewell, Sam. I hope you got to see Montana.