SAM NEILL A proper JOB

The screen star regales us with his daggy tales of starting out as an actor in NZ.

He is acting royalty and a Kiwi icon, yet when Sam Neill revealed to The Weekly last year that he was spending some time at home in Central Otago jotting down his memoirs, he was quick to state, "Not that people will be particularly interested." In fact, he confessed he didn't even know if his musings would become a fully-fledged book, but he was enjoying the process of reliving memories. Fast-forward to now and the 75-year-old can add author to his impressive list of achievements with the release of his life story, Did I Ever Tell You This? The book is a funny and entertaining collection of stories from his colourful past, present and future, and shows that people do indeed care very much about who shaped the man behind the roles and what makes this charismatic actor tick. In this exclusive extract, Sam takes us back to where it all began.

I'm often asked, did you always want to be an actor? The answer is no. It never occurred to me.

I'm from a small city in a small country, profoundly isolated from the rest of the world, at the deep south of the Pacific Ocean. The idea that I could become an actor, a screen actor, was something so far over someone else's horizon that I never gave it a second thought. There was nowhere in New Zealand where you could train to be an actor. No one was making movies, no one thought of making films in New Zealand when I was a kid, as far as I knew. I loved going to the films on a rainy afternoon, to lose myself in a world, in a story, that was as remote from me in my life as possible. The people in these movies were from somewhere else altogether. In British films they were better tailored and spoke better English than anyone I knew in New Zealand. With the honourable exception of my own father. Dad had perfect posture, iron upright, and was every inch the British officer. People like John Mills and David Niven played Dad in films.