His brilliant career

Sam Neill wrote his memoir in some haste as he dealt with cancer. According to Stephen Fry, it's 'fabulously entertaining".

- MICHELE HEWITSON

Actor, vintner and menagerie keeper Sam Neill begins his memoir with a tale from when his younger daughter, Elena, was an infant at school. "The teacher asked the circle of little children around her, 'What does your mummy or your daddy do for a job?"

"The little hands went up in the air ... My mummy's a lawyer. My daddy's a constant. My mummy builds houses. And so on.

"When it came to Elena, the answer about me was both perceptive and entirely accurate. 'My daddy sits in caravans."

In Did I Ever Tell You This?, our best-known movie star goes on to concede that he's spent much of his life sitting in film-set caravans (or trailers, as they're known in the US) waiting for someone to tell him what to do. "When Elena would visit me at work, that is what I would be doing. Sitting in a trailer, in a car park somewhere, having a cuppa, waiting: her daddy at work. It doesn't sound like a life well lived, does it? At least it's quiet."

This is a very Sam Neill story. It says, "Yeah, okay, I'm a bit famous but not all that famous, and really, what a silly life to somehow just fall into." In other words, any success he's had has been down more to luck than any great talent.

He is probably mostly a bit famous for having been Dr Alan Grant, and being chased by fearsome dinosaurs in three of the Jurassic Park movies, most recently, last year's Jurassic World: Dominion. Yes, I can hear that sigh from here, Sam Neill.

There were three possible endings for his memoir. The first was that he died before finishing writing it. The second was that he finished the book and then died. The third was that he would live. It is not giving anything away to say that the third ending is what happened.