Journalist Laura Tingle has revealed her ex-partner Sam Neil was “pretty sick” for the past couple of weeks before his death, as reports claim the film and TV star had recently suffered pneumonia.

The New Zealand-born actor passed away in Sydney on Monday surrounded by his family, with a post on his Instagram account saying the loss was “sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free”.

No further details have yet been released by the family, but Tingle – who dated Neill for several years from 2018 and remained friends with the Jurassic Park star – said his immune system had been compromised by the treatment he received for a rare, aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“His poor old body just sort of got a bit exhausted,” she said in an interview on ABC Radio Sydney and reported by news.com.au.

“He’s been pretty sick for the last couple of weeks, and everybody who loved him has been willing him on from near and far, but I think it was just a bit too much to recover from one more time.”

Tingle and Neill became involved after the actor separated from his second wife Noriko Watanabe in 2017 after nearly three decades of marriage. He had previously been married to fellow Kiwi actor Lisa Harrow, whom he met while filming Omen III: The Final Conflict.

After Neill’s death, Tingle posted a tribute on Instagram captioned “Sweet dreams darling Sam” and accompanied by a gallery of photographs and video clips of the two of them together.

The official statement announcing Neill’s death thanked the staff at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital “for their incredible care”, and added that more details would be shared later.

In the meantime, however, his Hunt for the Wilderpeople co-star and friend, Rima Te Wiata, has revealed that he was recently sick with pneumonia.

“It really sucks actually,” Te Wiata told the podcast Ryan Bridge TODAY in comments later reported by The New Zealand Herald.

“As he said in the press once, he’s not scared of death but he would be annoyed. He would be like, ‘Oh for goodness sake I just got over my cancer and now look, now I get pneumonia. What next?

“But he’s on his big journey now.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Auckland Actors (@aucklandactors)

Te Wiata, who played Neill’s on-screen wife in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, described him as having “a good energy to be around”, and “a very steady, peaceful, grounded man”.

Other friends and colleagues of the actor from around the world have also paid tribute to him in recent days, including American directors Stephen Spielberg and Colin Trevorrow, who worked with him on the original and rebooted Jurassic Park movies.

“He was charming, kind, funny and intelligent. He will be greatly missed and my heart goes out to his family,” said Australian actor Nicole Kidman, who starred with Neill in the thriller Dead Calm.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New Zealand PM Christopher Luxon also acknowledged him as “one of the greats”.

Neill, who is survived by four children and eight grandchildren, was a vintner in New Zealand as well as being known for a range of roles including in TV series Peaky Blinders, Apples Never Fall and The Twelve.

One of his most recent projects was The Fox, an Australian black comedy fantasy directed by Dario Russo about a fox hunter who encounters a shape-shifting fox that offers him an opportunity to transform his partner into the perfect woman.

The Fox also features well-known actors such as Olivia Colman, Damon Herriman, Peter O’Brien and Miranda Otto, with Neill voicing “the Magpie”. It is set to screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival next month.