I remember watching an interview with actor Sam Neill, who has died aged 78, saying “Good screen acting hints at secrets. At other lives underneath the veneer.”

At the time, I wondered what were these secrets Neill was referring to.

I just had to look at the vast body of Neill’s work, the characters he played, and how he played them to answer that question.

Claiming him as Australian

The actor was born Nigel John Dermot Neill in 1947 in Northern Ireland before moving to New Zealand as a child. In the time-honoured tradition of Australia claiming New Zealand talent as our own, it was when he made the move across the pond that he first found fame and the launching pad for his international career.

A law school dropout, he soon found acting to be his calling while at university, acting in a number of plays before moving to New Zealand television and his first starring role in the action thriller feature Sleeping Dogs (1977).

This film got him noticed in Australia where he picked up a small role in television series The Sullivans before landing his first major motion picture – My Brilliant Career (1979), opposite another emerging talent of the Australian screen, Judy Davis.

He made a plethora of less widely known films........

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