In this unexpected memoir, written in a creative burst of just a few months in 2022, Sam Neill tells the story of how he became one of the world’s most celebrated actors, who has worked with everyone from Meryl Streep to Isabel Adjani, from Jeff Goldblum to Sean Connery, from Steven Spielberg to Jane Campion.
By his own account, his career has been a series of unpredictable turns of fortune. Born in 1947 in Northern Ireland, he emigrated to New Zealand at the age of seven. His family settled in Dunedin on the South Island, but young Sam was sent away to boarding school in Christchurch, where he was hopeless at sports and discovered he enjoyed acting.
But how did you become an actor in New Zealand in the 1960 and 1970s where there was no film industry? After university he made documentary films while also appearing in occasional amateur productions of Shakespeare. In 1977 he took the lead in Sleeping Dogs, the first feature made in New Zealand in more than a decade, a project that led to a major role in Gillian Armstrong’s celebrated My Brilliant Career.
And after that Sam Neill found his way, sometimes by accident, into his own brilliant career. He has worked around the world, an actor who has moved effortlessly from blockbuster to art house to TV, from Dr Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park movies to The Piano and Peaky Blinders.
Did I Ever Tell You This? is a joy to read, a marvellous and often very funny book, the work of a natural storyteller who is a superb observer of other people, and who writes with love and warmth about his family. It is also his account of his life outside film, especially in Central Otago where he established Two Paddocks, his vineyard famous for its pinot noir.
Source: Did I Ever Tell You This?: A Memoir by Sam Neill
Did I Ever Tell You? is Sam Neill’s accidental memoir, written as a distraction, while receiving treatment for cancer. I wrote a longer response here.
Marginalia
GIELGUD
‘Oh. Oh, Sam Neill,’ said Gielgud, turning to the unfortunate blushing assistant. ‘Sam Neill. I hear he’s fucked absolutely everyone in London.’ He paused. ‘Has he fucked you, Sebastian?’
HOW TO BE A GOOD ACTOR
Acting might look easy, but it’s actually very hard. In fact, if it looks like it’s easy, it means that the actor is doing something very hard very well. If it looks like ‘acting’, forget it.
I sometimes ask people if there’s something particular that they bring to every role that would be universal to their career. Meryl Streep had an interesting answer. She claimed that she makes a point of tripping at some stage in a film. I told her that I like to make sure that I do a 360-degree turn somewhere in the flick. I think I’ve forgotten to do that for a while. I should start again.
I once read something practical and useful that has stood me in good stead. When you go to leave, look at the door before you get up and depart. If you don’t do that (and people don’t necessarily do that in life), it strangely looks as if you’ve been more spontaneous than was called for. You might be leaving in a huff, for instance. No, looking at the door first indicates a whole bunch of things—you have another life, you have somewhere to go, you are thinking within the scene. The rule, of course, extrapolates to so many other things; the door is just one example.
We were talking about these little things on the Jurassic World Dominion set one day. Chris Pratt sat up and said that every time he leaves by a door he looks back into the room. I must always remember that whenever confronted by a door in the future. Again, it’s a simple thing that conveys a tremendous amount. I was very interested to see Chris at work. And here is the big difference between someone like him and me. He’s really thought about what it means to be an action hero. It’s a real job. I never did that on the Jurassic films. On the contrary, I thought I was playing an ordinary guy who finds himself in a heap of trouble and muddles his way to survival. Everyman, not hero. Pratt is absolutely fantastic as a hero.
There are actors I know who can articulate well what it is that we do. Bryan Brown is particularly succinct: ‘It’s simple. Just open your mouth and be real.’ If that’s helpful, you can use it. I rather like Alan Cumming’s definition: ‘Pretend to be someone else, but really, really, mean it.’ Yes, I agree, conviction is everything. I think that’s a pretty good mantra, and worth committing to memory. The mantra always used to be: learn your lines and hit your marks. But marks are now things of the past. Focus pullers and new technology have made them redundant. It remains a good idea to learn your lines.
Reviews
In Did I Ever Tell You This? Neill shares quite a bit more of himself. Indeed he has laid himself quite bare and, like most actors awaiting the reviews, he wants to know how he did. As memoirs go, it is very funny and extremely entertaining, but with a judicious touch of poignancy. No self-pity here. He is an enormously good raconteur and also deliciously indiscreet in some of his tale-telling (co-stars behaving badly, take note). But still, he is careful with his private life. Details of past relationships are either omitted, as in the case of his most recent relationship with the Canberra press gallery journalist Laura Tingle, or referred to fleetingly as with his marriages to actor Lisa Harrow and to film makeup artist Noriko Watanabe. His four children and eight grandchildren appear as careful references to his life’s joy and great love.
Source: Sam Neill on his new memoir and living with blood cancer: ‘I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me’ by Lucy Clark
If you’re looking for gossip, you’ll find plenty to enjoy. But this is hardly the scurrilous slander mongering and barbed brickbats of a Hedda Hopper skewering or an ‘article’ in the National Enquirer. In fact, most of the people Neill mentions he seems to rate pretty highly. But when he does come across a curmudgeon or someone who behaved less than favourably on set, he tells it as he sees it. Though, to be frank, there are few shocking revelations.
Source: Book review: Did I Ever Tell You This?, Sam Neill by Madeleine Swain
I finished this memoir feeling like I had been at a raucous dinner party, seated next to him of course, where tales are flung from one end of the earth to the other and the evening finishes with a lovely Two Paddocks pinot noir. And a relief that he is in remission.
Source: Did I Ever Tell You This? by Sam Neill by Chris Gordon