Sam Neill died in Sydney on Monday, surrounded by family. He was 78, and less than three months past the news he had spent three years waiting to deliver: that he was cancer-free.

His family announced the death in a statement. "Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life," it said. "The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free." No cause has been given.

Neill revealed the illness in 2023 in his memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?, written in part during chemotherapy for stage-three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma. In late April this year he announced that a trial treatment had worked and the disease was gone.

The career ran five decades and two hemispheres. Australian audiences met him first, as Harry Beecham opposite Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career in 1979. Hollywood met him as Dr Alan Grant, the palaeontologist in Jurassic Park in 1993, a role he returned to in Jurassic World Dominion in 2022. In between and after came The Piano, The Dish, Peaky Blinders, Peter Rabbit and Thor: Love and Thunder.

He was born in Northern Ireland, raised in New Zealand, and worked so often on this side of the Tasman that both film industries treat him as their own. New Zealand appointed him a Distinguished Companion of its Order of Merit in 2006. When titled honours returned in 2009 he declined the knighthood, then accepted it in 2022.

Away from set he grew pinot noir. His Two Paddocks vineyard in Central Otago, established in 1993, became as much a part of his public identity as any role, and his accounts of its ducks, pigs and farm dogs had an audience of their own.

Anthony Albanese called him "wry and dry, thoughtful and laconic", a man who "fought illness with the same dignity, humour and conviction that gave strength to his every performance". Magda Szubanski wrote that she was in complete shock. "Vale my darling friend," she said. Richard E Grant kept it to four words: "Sail on, kind Sir."

Tributes were still arriving on Tuesday from both sides of the Tasman, from co-stars, directors and audiences who knew him from one hemisphere's films or the other's. His last public announcement, in April, was that he was well again.