One of the cinema’s great talents, grand figures and a gentleman in full, Sam Neill has died. He’d fought a deadly cancer off, but that battle must have taken a terrible toll to get him to “cancer free.”

He was 78.

His iconic turn in the blockbuster “Jurassic Park” — mocked by he and his co-stars above — is what most people remember him for. I interviewed him when “Sirens” came out, a winking turn in a titillating comedy, and one or two other times in later years.

My favorite films of his might have been “Dead Calm,” but he never gave a bad performance on the big or small screen. He was in the Down Under thriller series “Untamed” last year, twinkled in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” “Rams,” “A Cry in the Dark,” ‘Children of the Revolution,” “Sleeping Dogs,” My Brilliant Career,” devilshly regal in “Restoration,” Russian in “The Hunt for Red October,” “The Piano,” and more than one “Jurassic.”

During COVID, a recovering Neill regaled Youtube viewers with a little out-of-character ukulele playing and singing, something I’d forgetten about. A lovely gesture in that “Entertainers entertain” tradition.

Neill was latterly a rancher, a winemaker (Who wasn’t?), an acclaimed memoirist, a gentle soul and a real charmer. I recall Gabriel Byrne telling me the story of how he introduced his little boy to Neill somewhere in Hollywood once. The kid was overawed, and had just one question he sputtered out about “velociraptors.”

Neill grinned, pulled out a prop raptor claw he kept on his person during his Jurassic years for just such encounters, and demonstrated to the lad how a dinosaur like that would gut a little kid like him. Straight out of the movie. And then he’d wickedly chuckle, as Byrne rememembered it, giving a child a memory that would last forever.

Don’t meet your idols, they tell you. But what a bloke, what a twinkling talent. Whar a sweetheart. He will be missed.