TIZIANA FABI / AFP
Actor Sam Neill, here in September 2017, during the screening of the film “Sweet Country”, presented in competition at the 74th Venice Film Festival.
CINEMA – Sad news for the actor inseparable from his role as paleontologist Alan Grant. On the occasion of the release of his memoirs, British-New Zealand actor Sam Neill revealed on Friday March 17 that he had stage three blood cancer.
For the exit Did I Ever Tell You This ?the actor who became famous with the general public for his interpretation of Professor Grant in Jurassic Park in 1993 came back to the treatment he has been following for more than a year now and which more or less directly pushed him to write a book about his life, to pass the time.
The actor with a prestigious career explains that the writing of his book began after the discovery in March 2022 of an angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (LTAI), while he was on the promotional tour for the last part of the saga. Jurassic Park (Jurassic World: The World After).
” What am I going to do ? »
« I found myself with nothing to do » he explains in an interview for the Guardian, following the failure of a first chemotherapy. The actor finally settled on a new medication that he has to take every month for the rest of his life.
« I am used to work. I like to work. I love going to work. I like to be with people every day and enjoy human company, friendship and all those things. And suddenly I was deprived of it. And I thought, ‘what am I going to do?’ “says the actor filmed by Jane Campion, Steven Spielberg, François Ozon or even John Carpenter.
His blood cancer therefore pushed him to write his memoirs, he who had ” never intended to write a book “. Sam Neill continues: As I continued to write, I realized that it actually gave me a reason to live and I would go to bed thinking: I will write about this tomorrow…it will entertain me’. It really saved my life, because I couldn’t have gone through this without doing anything ».
And rather than writing only about his life through the prism of the disease, the 75-year-old actor prefers to evoke his childhood in Ireland and New Zealand, his life course, without forgetting crisp anecdotes on the many films. filmed during his career. Finally the actor explains to the British newspaper that his cancer serves rather as ” spiral wire to his memoirs.
« I can’t pretend that last year didn’t have its dark times, but those dark times bring light “, ends up admitting the one who also appears in the series Peaky Blinders and whom we hope to see again soon on the big screen.
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