Actor Sam Neill, whose screen career spanned nearly five decades and saw him move with rare ease between Cannes award-winning dramas and the biggest blockbusters Hollywood could produce, died Monday in Sydney. He was 78. His family called the death “sudden and unexpected,” a cruel twist given that Neill had announced only in April that he was finally cancer-free. He reportedly died of pneumonia, months removed from the rare blood cancer that had shadowed him for the last few years.

Born in Omagh, Northern Ireland, in 1947, Neill moved with his family to Christchurch, New Zealand, at age seven, and it was there that he built the foundation of a career defined by range. His international breakthrough came with Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career in 1979, opposite Judy Davis in a film that put both actors on the map. Throughout the ’80s, Neill proved just as comfortable in thriller territory, playing the protective and resourceful husband in Dead Calm and the steady Soviet submarine officer alongside Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October.

Then came 1993, the year that made the case for Neill as one of his generation’s most versatile actors. Within a matter of months, he played the withholding husband in Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or-winning film The Piano, and paleontologist Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg‘s blockbuster Jurassic Park. Few actors have the range to move between those two poles of cinema so convincingly, let alone back-to-back in the same year.

The rest of his career kept that duality firmly intact. He built a cult following in horror with John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness and Event Horizon, brought a quiet menace to Peaky Blinders as Chief Inspector Chester Campbell, and, in 2016, found a late-career high playing the gruff Uncle Hec opposite Julian Dennison in Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a film that won him a whole new generation of fans. In 2022, he closed the loop on his best-known role, returning as Alan Grant alongside original co-stars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic World Dominion.

Off-screen, Neill split his time between acting and Two Paddocks, his winery in New Zealand’s Central Otago region. He also became something of an internet favourite (especially on Instagram) for his dry humour, enthusiasm for wine, and for his farm’s birds, pigs, and cats. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1991 and knighted in New Zealand’s Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2022, the same year he was diagnosed with stage-three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma. He wrote about the diagnosis and the chemotherapy that followed with characteristic candour and wit in his 2023 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?

Tributes after the actor’s passing arrived quickly from those who had worked alongside him. Dern, his friend of more than three decades, called him “my beloved lifetime friend… a true and noble gentleman, wrapped up in my dream leading man.” Cillian Murphy, his Peaky Blinders co-star, said, “Like everyone who knew and worked with Sam, I admired him and adored him in equal measure. He was one of the kindest, funniest and gentlest people, and one of the finest actors.”

That combination, warmth matched by range, is what made Neill’s death land so hard for so many this week. He was, rarely for an actor of his stature, exactly as well-liked as he was well-regarded. As they would say Down Under, “Vale, Mr. Neill”.