Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern fondly remembered their mutual costar Sam Neill, who passed away on July 13, 2026, by sharing a bottle of his Two Paddocks wine. The A-list friends, who starred together in the HBO miniseries “Big Little Lies” almost a decade ago, shared a selfie of the bittersweet moment on July 28.
The blonde besties smiled into the camera, both dressed in dark tops, while Kidman clutched a bottle of pinot noir from Neill’s vineyard named “The Last Chance.” The “Jurassic Park” star, who succumbed to pneumonia after previously beating a rare blood cancer known as angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, founded the organic winery in 1993.
Dern captioned the candid moment, “Raising a glass to our beloved friend and leading man, Sam. Just the way he would want, toasting with his gorgeous Pinot.” She made sure to tag the Instagram accounts of Kidman, Neill, and the Two Paddocks vineyard.
Sam Neill Sings With Laura Dern & Jeff Goldblum in Star-Studded Memory
The day Neill passed away, he was fondly remembered by another member of the “Jurassic” franchise, Bryce Dallas Howard, who shared a star-studded moment of the actor singing alongside his “Jurassic Park” costars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, while Goldblum also played the piano.
She revealed the clip was during the unforgettable times she spent living amongst the group “together in that little bubble” while they all worked together on “Jurassic World Dominion,” the third film in the “Jurassic World” trilogy, which was released in 2022.
She called Neil “Funny, warm, wickedly self-deprecating, endlessly kind” before praising him as “A beautiful human being who happened to also be Alan Grant.”
Nicole Kidman Starred With Sam Neill in the 1990 Film ‘Dead Calm’
A few years before teaming up with Dern for 1993’s “Jurassic Park,” Neill starred with Kidman in the lesser known psychological thriller “Dead Calm.” The film ended up being a giant stepping stone for Kidman’s career, leading to her major big screen breakthrough as Dr. Claire Lewicki in 1990’s “Days of Thunder.”
The role was life-changing for Kidman in more ways than one. It was the audition for that project where she met her first husband Tom Cruise, later describing the moment in a 2002 interview with Vanity Fair as love at first sight. The couple went on to adopt two children together, Isabella and Connor, before calling things off in 2001.
“He basically swept me off my feet. I fell madly, passionately in love. And as happens when you fall in love, my whole plan in terms of what I wanted for my life—I was like, ‘Forget it. This is it.’ I was consumed by it, willingly.”
Kidman reacted to Neill’s sudden death by writing a heartfelt tribute in which she said, ““He was one of the greats… A joy to be around. We met when I was just 18, and he took me under his wing, and we stayed friends for life. He was charming, kind, funny and intelligent. He will be greatly missed, and my heart goes out to his family.”
