NOT MUCH SEEMS to faze actor Sam Neill these days. In his latest film, Jurassic Park III, he maintains an air of calm and con-trol while madness and mayhem - and the odd dinosaur - rant and rave around him.
But it wasn't always so. When the Northern Ireland-born, New Zealand-raised Neill started out in the business in the early 1970s, fresh from the University of Canterbury, he was crippled by stage fright. And it wasn't the kind brought on by facing the world's toughest critics and audiences on opening night on Broadway. No, this stage fright came on when he donned pantaloons and ponced about in front of schoolchildren in the wilds of the New Zealand countryside.
'I sort of came into acting by default, I guess,' says the 54-year-old, relaxing in a Tokyo conference room. 'When I was at the age when you think, 'Well what am I going to do as a career?' I acted for a year - taking Shakespeare to schools, to unwilling kids in the countryside.
'It was a thankless task trying to sell them on Henry V. And I used to get terrible, quivering stage fright. I would feel sick until I got on stage and it wasn't much fun. I thought at first I couldn't really cut it as an actor. But I guess in a sense I discovered it was just one of the few things I could actually do.'
Terrified by theatre work, Neill turned his attention to film. He signed up with the New Zealand National Film Unit and trained as an editor before moving on to directing documentaries. By chance, he landed a role in a low-budget production put together by director Roger Donaldson. It was a career- and life-changing move. Sleeping Dogs (1977) - in which Neill played a cuckolded husband who joins a band of freedom fighters - became the first New Zealand film to open in the United States.
Neill was then lured across the Tasman Sea to Australia where he was cast opposite Judy Davis in director Gillian Armstrong's breakthrough film, My Brilliant Career (1979). The film screened at the Cannes Film Festival the following year, and Neill's performance caught the eye of screen legend James Mason, who brought him over to England.
