His unshowy gifts, which discreetly carried arthouse drama and blockbuster adventures alike, never sucked a movie’s oxygen in to his own performance
Sam Neill was the leading man’s leading man who achieved something no other actor could: he was charismatic and self-effacing at the same time.
He could play handsome and good-humoured or devilishly sinister, often the husband and paterfamilias, perennially in some unspecified state of early middle age, sometimes in a period colonial setting, but the movie’s oxygen was never sucked away into his own unselfishly excellent performance.
