What is the India connection of Jurassic Park star Sam Neill? His trip to Jodhpur

New Zealand actor Sam Neill passed away at the age of 78 in Sydney, just months after he defeated cancer. Neill was diagnosed with stage-3 blood cancer in 2022, and in April this year, doctors declared him cancer-free. “Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life. The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free. They would like to express their deepest gratitude to the staff at St Vincent’s Private Hospital for their incredible care,” his family wrote in a statement posted on his Instagram on Monday. The family has said his exact cause of death will be shared at a later date, and has asked for privacy in the meantime. The India connection Neill’s connection to India goes back to the 1990s. The actor travelled to the country in 1994 to shoot an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book . He stayed at the palace of Maharaja of Jodhpur, which Neill described as “an extraordinary and most beautiful place”. Nearly three decades later, while promoting Jurassic World Dominion in 2022, Neill reflected on just how “overwhelming” and “sensory overload” that experience had been. “ I made a film in the country, and when you say India to me, all the time spent making it comes back to me so vividly. It was an amazing experience for me to be there. I found it overwhelming,” Neill said in an interview to Hindustan Times . “It was beautiful, but it was too beautiful. It was noisy, but it was too noisy. It was colourful, but it was too colourful. All my senses were overloaded the whole time I was in the country.” Yet what stayed with him most were the quiet evenings, sitting on a terrace in Jodhpur. “But it was the evenings on the terrace, overlooking the plains in one direction in Jodhpur, and in the other direction, the distant horizons of that extraordinary arid land with that lovely blue sky changing colour as the sun goes down.” Though, he said, some memories still unsettle him. He described the anxiety of riding in the old 1950s-style Morris taxis, through crowded streets, swerving past pedestrians and other vehicles. “I would have to close my eyes in cars, because every minute we seem to be close to death. But in India, it seemed completely normal,” he recalled in that interview . “After eight or ten weeks, I got on the plane and just breathed a sigh of relief. I thought to myself, ‘it is the most extraordinary experience of my life’. But I just needed a little calm.” Not many know that Neill’s ancestors served in India with the Army, and by coincidence, his character in The Jungle Book was a British Army officer. “The generation on my mother’s side were a part of the [British] Indian Army, so we go way back. We have a lot of family connections there. In some way, it’s somewhere in my DNA. India felt like I was going home,” he had told HT . The OG paleontologist Neill’s career began with Roger Donaldson’s 1977 action thriller Sleeping Dogs , which opened the door to a string of leading roles at home. But, his breakthrough role was as paleontologist Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic Jurassic Park . He went on to reprise the role in Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World Dominion (2022). But his filmography stretched far beyond the dinosaurs: he starred opposite Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm , played a real-life British spy in the acclaimed miniseries Reilly: Ace of Spies , appeared twice alongside Meryl Streep, and won acclaim in Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or-winning The Piano (1993). His body of work earned him three Golden Globe nominations, the first in 1985 for Reilly: Ace of Spies , followed by nods for One Against the Wind (1992) and the titular role in Merlin (1999). Neill even got two Primetime Emmy nominations, for Merlin in 1998 and as narrator of New Zealand: Earth’s Mythical Islands in 2017. On television, he was perhaps best known in recent years for playing the ruthless Major Chester Campbell in the first two seasons of Peaky Blinders (2013-14). Neill was last seen on screen as Paul Souter in the Netflix crime series Untamed .