Sam Neill's nuanced performance was 'Jurassic Park's' secret weapon

When Sam Neill died at seventy-eight, the world mourned the dinosaurs and the spectacle, but the quieter loss was the man who made the spectacle believable. As Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park, Neill performed something rare: he translated wonder into a physical language that an audience could borrow, standing in for all of us in the moment the impossible became real. Across fifty-five years and one hundred fifty projects, he proved himself a craftsman of uncommon depth — and yet it is one man in a Jeep, hat torn from his head, face cracked open by awe, that will endure as his truest monument.