Sam Neill’s 2023 comments on wanting ‘another decade or two’ resurface after death

Sam Neill spoke openly about his battle with cancer, his thoughts on mortality, and his gratitude for life in the years leading up to his death at age 78.

Sam Neill spoke openly about his battle with cancer, his thoughts on mortality, and his gratitude for life in the years leading up to his death at age 78.
The actor’s reflections came through his 2023 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This? along with interviews that followed once he went public with his diagnosis.
Neill revealed he had angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, while doing press for Jurassic World Dominion in 2022. In his memoir, he captured the uncertainty of that period bluntly, admitting he might be running out of time and needed to move faster with his plans.
In a 2023 conversation with The Guardian, Neill acknowledged that the year had brought difficult moments, but said those moments made him appreciate the good ones more, leaving him thankful simply to be alive and grateful for the people around him.
On the subject of death itself, Neill said he was not afraid of it, though he admitted it would be frustrating to go too soon. He spoke about wanting more time with his grandchildren and to watch the olive trees, cypresses, and terraces on his New Zealand property grow into maturity.
Chemotherapy kept his illness under control for a while before it lost effectiveness. Neill later underwent CAR T-cell therapy, a treatment that reprograms a patient’s own immune cells to target cancer. He described the chemo period as grim but necessary, and said he felt lost once it stopped working.
The treatment ultimately worked. Neill later announced a scan showed no trace of cancer in his body, calling it extraordinary.
His family confirmed Neill died on July 13, 2026, in Sydney, Australia, describing his death as sudden and unexpected, and noting that he remained cancer-free at the time.