“Jurassic Park” star Sam Neill died of pneumonia, his agent confirmed on Thursday.
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The BBC reported that Philip Grenz, Neill’s longtime agent, decided to reveal the cause after speaking to the actor’s family in order to correct “inaccurate and outright falsehoods” in the media. Neill, who died on Monday in Sydney, Australia at the age of 78, had been battling a form of blood cancer since 2022, but revealed in April that he was cancer free. In their announcement, Neill’s family said his death was “sudden and unexpected.”
“As Sam Neill’s longtime rep, I spoke with his family and wish to clarify some details for his fans,” Grenz said in his statement. “Sam passed away from pneumonia. Prior to becoming sick, Sam had valiantly fought and beaten lymphoma through a new treatment called CAR-T therapy.”
Grenz added that in the past year, Neill had “filmed four projects back-to-back… all of which will be released within the coming months.”
He added, “I’d like to thank those who were truly close to Sam for considering his privacy with the respect he earned and his loved ones need and deserve during this immeasurably difficult time.”
Neill’s cause of death being pneumonia was first shared on Tuesday by his fellow New Zealand actor Rima Te Waita, who co-starred with him in 2016’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople.”
“It really sucks, actually,” Te Wiata told the New Zealand Herald. “I think he would be like: ‘For goodness sake, I got over my cancer. And now look, now I get pneumonia. What next?’”
Neill’s ex-girlfriend, Australian journalist Laura Tingle, also told “Sydney Mornings” that he had been “pretty sick for a couple of weeks” leading up to his death.
“He’d been fighting various forms of cancer for at least the last five years intensively. And that takes a toll on anybody’s body,” she said. “He’d had a lot of chemo and a lot of immunotherapy and, thankfully, it had finally cleared him of the blood cancer that he’d had, but it left him pretty compromised in terms of his immune system and I think his poor body sort of got a bit exhausted, as makes sense.”
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