Did I Ever Tell You This? by Sam Neill (2022) is the memoir of Irish-born New Zealander Sam Neill, known for his acting roles in the 1988 film A Cry in the Dark, the 1993 film The Piano, the Jurassic Park movies (1993-2022) and the television series Peaky Blinders (2013-2022).
Sam Neill – real name Nigel – begins by saying that he has been sitting in trailers for much of his life, waiting for the film action to begin. His unexpected film career was not a result of a childhood dream, undying ambition, nor forward planning. His family left Northern Ireland for the promised land of New Zealand – as far away from Ireland as you get on this planet – when Sam was seven years old in 1954. At 11, in boarding school, he changed his name to Sam: “probably the best decision I made in my life.” His boarding school years led to a love of acting at a time when there was no film industry in New Zealand.
He recalls tales of his early career, where “Life, I think, is often as much about the people who say no to you as the ones who say yes.” And despite being “a phenomenally lazy young man” he began his film career editing and directing before taking small roles. The move to Australia in 1979 was “exhilarating” personally and professionally.
Sam Neill recalls movies, friends, film celebrities, travel, and life as he embarked on a full-blown acting career, starring alongside colleagues such as Meryl Streep, Isabel Adjani, Sean Connery, and Jeff Goldblum. He ends with his life as a farmer and vigneron in Central Otago, New Zealand, in his vineyard called Two Paddocks, “the world’s greatest producer of premium organic pinot noir.”
The memoir, written hastily after being diagnosed with blood cancer in 2022, is nevertheless and interesting book, full of humour and warmth.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). She lives in Paris.
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