Sam Neill’s death at 78 has left the film world reeling — and a co-star has now revealed that the beloved New Zealand actor was suffering from pneumonia in his final period, having only recently declared himself free of cancer.

The cruelty of that sequence has not been lost on the people who knew him.

“He Would Be Annoyed”

Fellow Kiwi actor Rima Te Wiata, who starred opposite Neill in the 2016 comedy “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” told the New Zealand Herald that Neill had pneumonia before he died.

She said he was not frightened of death — but he would have been irritated by it.

Her imagined version of his reaction is almost painfully in character: “For goodness sake, I got over my cancer. And now look, now I get pneumonia. What next?”

“It really sucks, actually,” she told the outlet’s video programme.

She added, more gently: “He’s on his big journey now.”

Te Wiata offered no further detail, and it remains unclear precisely when Neill fell ill with pneumonia.

The Family’s Statement

Neill’s family announced his death on Monday.

Their statement described the loss as sudden and unexpected, while noting something they clearly found meaningful: he remained cancer free at the end.

No cause of death was specified.

A Long Fight, Recently Won

The context makes the timing especially bitter.

In his 2023 memoir “Did I Ever Tell You This?”, Neill wrote that he was possibly dying with stage-three non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

After several years of treatment for blood cancer, he declared himself cancer-free in April.

Journalist Laura Tingle of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who dated Neill for several years, offered the most detailed account of his final weeks.

“His poor old body just sort of got a bit exhausted,” she told ABC Radio Sydney.

She said he had been quite ill for a couple of weeks, with everyone who loved him willing him on from near and far — but it proved too much to recover from one more time.

Crucially, she explained the underlying vulnerability: extensive chemotherapy and immunotherapy had finally cleared the blood cancer, but left his immune system severely compromised.

The Jurassic Park Family

Neill was best known globally as paleontologist Alan Grant in 1993’s “Jurassic Park,” alongside Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Richard Attenborough.

Dern’s tribute was among the most personal. She called him a beloved lifetime friend, describing him as a true and noble gentleman wrapped up in her dream leading man. “I will love you forever, Dr. Alan Grant.”

Goldblum kept his brief: “The next great adventure begins.”

Steven Spielberg said he adored making all the Jurassic films with Neill, adding that the Jurassic family would endure and that Neill would never be forgotten by them or by his millions of fans worldwide.

Beyond the Dinosaurs

Neill accumulated more than 150 screen credits across a career spanning decades. Among them:

• “The Hunt for Red October”
• “The Piano”
• “Event Horizon”
• “Merlin”

In the 2010s he joined the British drama series “Peaky Blinders.”

His co-star Cillian Murphy said that, like everyone who knew and worked with him, he admired and adored Neill in equal measure — calling him one of the kindest, funniest, and gentlest people, and one of the finest actors.

Nicole Kidman described him as one of the greats and a joy to be around. The two met when she was just 18, she said, and he took her under his wing. They remained friends for life. She remembered him as charming, kind, funny, and intelligent.

The Life Behind the Work

Neill was born in Omagh, Northern Ireland, in 1947. His family relocated to New Zealand in the early 1950s, and the country claimed him as its own for the rest of his life.

In 2022, he accepted a knighthood in the New Zealand royal honours system.

The Shape of the Loss

There is a particular sadness in a story like this — a man who spent years fighting a disease that was trying to kill him, who won that fight, and who then could not survive the aftermath of the treatment that saved him.

Everyone who spoke about him this week reached for the same words: kind, funny, gentle, generous. That may be the more remarkable achievement than any of the films.