Sam Neill’s Lesson on Fame

A note to young leaders.

Sam Neill died suddenly last week – doubly sad, because he’d just beaten stage 3 lymphoma after a four-year fight.

He was, to use his phrase, a “free-range Otago boy” living on the battery farm of Hollywood, with its bright lights and cramped egos.

So Sam’s retreat during Covid to Two Paddocks, his farm in Central Otago, felt less like exile than release. There, he entertained half a million followers by singing “Moon River” to his cows and playing Radiohead on a ukulele to his ducks.

He named the farm animals after his famous friends. A chicken called Meryl Streep. Susan Sarandon and Anjelica Huston were lambs. Hugo Weaving was a ram. Presiding over them all was Charlie Pickering, a Muscovy duck who had concluded that Neill was his father and swam beside him in the farm lake each summer.

Sam reported on their affairs with the faux solemnity of a foreign correspondent. “Meryl Streep was killed by a ferret recently,” he announced. “I found her as a pile of feathers one day.”

Hugo Weaving met a more enviable end. “He died happy … doing what rams do,” Sam explained. “He fell off the back of a female sheep. He went the distance and died on the job.”

No wonder Australians and Kiwis loved him. He walked with kings (and dinosaurs), but never lost the common touch.

Fame is an occupational hazard. It enlarges a life the way a magnifying glass enlarges an ant – not always to the ant’s advantage.

Stay close to the soil you came from. Keep one foot on the stage – and the other in the mud.