WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Sam Neill, a smoothly elegant and versatile actor whose career moved from art film to blockbuster as he dodged velociraptors in “Jurassic Park” and played Holly Hunter’s husband in “The Piano,” has died. He was 78.

In 2023, Neill disclosed he had been diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Neill died on Monday in Sydney, according to a statement posted to the actor’s social media page.

His death was “sudden and unexpected,” the statement said, adding that he “remained cancer free” when he died. A cause of death wasn’t specified.

“Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life,” his family wrote.

Actor came to world’s notice with ‘Dead Calm’ and ‘My Brilliant Career’

Neill was one of a host of actors and directors who achieved international fame after an explosion of Australian films that began in the late 1970s, a list that includes Paul Hogan, Mel Gibson, Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe, Jane Campion, Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong. His range was remarkable, playing opposite Helena Bonham Carter in the Alan Ayckbourn comedy “Sweet Revenge” to chopping off Hunter’s finger in “The Piano” to poking his own eyes out in the sci-fi horror “Event Horizon.”

In “Omen III: The Final Conflict,” he played Damien the Antichrist and he also played Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in “The Tudors.”

The actor first came to the attention of international audiences in Armstrong’s 1979 film “My Brilliant Career,” which also introduced Judy Davis. He later appeared in Phillip Noyce’s “Dead Calm,” a classy thriller set at sea and co-starring the then-relatively unknown Nicole Kidman.

Neill twice co-starred with Meryl Streep, in Australian director Fred Schepisi’s “Plenty” and — again for Schepisi — in “A Cry in the Dark,” a film about the sensationalized aftermath of a dingo killing a baby in the Australian Outback. He earned an Emmy nomination for his performance in the title role of the 1998 miniseries “Merlin” and another as narrator of 2017’s “Wild New Zealand.”

‘Jurassic Park’ was his best-known film

Perhaps Neill achieved his highest level of fame in “Jurassic Park” playing paleontologist Alan Grant, who is summoned to an island off Costa Rica where a theme park has been built to house herds of cloned dinosaurs. He co-starred alongside Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough.

His character was thoughtful and reasonable, a scientist who warned the mastermind of the theme park before the chaos: “Dinosaurs and man, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea what to expect?”

Grant survived the harrowing events when the creatures get loose, but didn’t return for “The Lost World: Jurassic Park II” in 1997. He came back for the third episode in 2001 and “Jurassic World: Dominion” in 2022.

“It’s probably a little late to learn these things,” he told the Daily New of New York in 2001, “but I finally feel I’ve worked out how to be an action hero. I’m happier with Grant this time. He’s gnarly and grizzled, but he looks like he knows what he’s doing.”

Neill grew up in Northern Ireland, then New Zealand

Born in 1947 in Northern Ireland, Neill emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 7. He was born Nigel Neill, but told interviewers he started to go by Sam because there were too many Nigels at his school.

His family settled in Dunedin on the South Island and he was sent to boarding school in Christchurch. After college, he took the lead in “Sleeping Dogs” in 1977, the first feature made in New Zealand in more than a decade.

Neill’s other film roles included playing a Soviet submarine officer who memorably dreams of a home in Montana in “The Hunt for Red October” and an investigator in director John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness.”

On the small screen, Neill played the malign Chester Campbell in TV’s “Peaky Blinders” and Thomas Jefferson in the four-hour CBS miniseries, “Sally Hemings: an American Tragedy.” On Apple TV+, he was on “Invasion,” playing Oklahoma Sheriff John Bell Tyson, a man late in his career searching for his purpose. In 2024 he starred opposite Annette Bening in the Peacock series “Apples Never Fall.”

Actor beloved in New Zealand as an unassuming celebrity

The actor became known in New Zealand as a modest and unassuming person who didn’t embrace celebrity. On social media, he often posted images of his farm animals, many of them affectionately named after celebrities and friends, like Laura Dern the chicken, Kylie Minogue the duck and Helena Bonham Carter the cow.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon mourned Neill as “one of the greats” in a statement posted to social media.

“He started out when there was barely a film industry to speak of,” Luxon wrote. “For more than fifty years he took New Zealand stories to the world and his talents helped make our film industry into what it is today.”

Neill was also a vintner and under his Two Paddocks brand, he produced pinot noir and riesling wines from his winery in the Central Otago region of New Zealand’s South Island.

His memoir “Did I Ever Tell You This?” came out in March 2023 and he was awarded a knighthood in recognition of his “outstanding contribution to film,” a title approved by the late Queen Elizabeth II.

“I can’t pretend that the last year hasn’t had its dark moments,” Neill told The Guardian in 2023, referring to his cancer diagnosis and treatment. “But those dark moments throw the light into sharp relief, you know, and have made me grateful for every day and immensely grateful for all my friends.”

He is survived by his four children and eight grandchildren.

GRAPEVINE, Texas (AP) — Wally Funk, an aviation pioneer who was the oldest woman to launch into space, has died. She was 87.

Funk died Wednesday at her apartment in an assisted living facility in the Dallas and Fort Worth suburb of Grapevine, Texas, Grapevine City Councilwoman Duff O’Dell said Thursday. O’Dell, who described herself as Funk’s caregiver, said she was by Funk’s side. Funk had fallen a couple of times recently and had an infection in her leg.

“It took its toll,” O’Dell said in a phone interview.

Funk was one of 13 female pilots who went through the same tests as NASA’s all-male astronaut corps in the early 1960s but never made it into space with that agency. In 2021, she got her chance aboard Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket.

At the time, the 82-year-old was the oldest person to go into space, though the record was later broken by “Star Trek” actor William Shatner and Ed Dwight, America’s first Black astronaut candidate. They were both 90.

Bezos chose Funk as an “honored guest” to ride alongside him and two others on an up-and-down hop from West Texas.

In a post on X, Blue Origin said Funk was a “pioneer in every sense of the word.”

“We were humbled to be part of her journey,” the post said.

O’Dell said Funk was the “most eternally optimistic person” she had ever met.

“She was told by many, many, many men, ‘No, you can’t do this. No you can’t do that,’ ” O’Dell said. “And she never got mad about it. She just was more determined.”

Funk was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, according to a brief biography released by the City of Grapevine.

In the 1960s, she and other female pilots went through astronaut training in the Mercury 13 program, but they were not allowed to become astronauts.

“Wally Funk never stopped believing that one day she would reach space. Her passion for flight, perseverance, and love of exploration will continue to inspire generations of Americans. Godspeed, Wally,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted Thursday on X.

FARO (AP) — Bonnie Tyler, the gravelly voiced, Grammy-nominated Welsh pop star best known for singing the chart-topping power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983, and seeing new generations succumb to its bombastic charms during solar and lunar eclipses, has died. She was 75.

Tyler died unexpectedly in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said Thursday in a statement on her website. She was hospitalized in May in Faro, where she had a home, for emergency intestinal surgery. She had been placed in an induced coma for a period but was reportedly improving last month and expected to make a good recovery.

“Bonnie’s family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of the illness that she was being treated for,” her family said.

Tyler earned three Grammy nods, represented Britain at the Eurovision Song Contest 2013, where she came in 19th. She was honored as a Member of the Order of the British Empire for her services to music by Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, all largely thanks to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which has had more that 1 billion streams, boosted by real eclipses in 2017 and 2024.

The song spent four weeks at No. 1, and when Stereogum reevaluated it in 2020, the music outlet declared it an “extinction-level event rendered in musical form.”

“It’s pop music as heart-pounding, chest-thumping, blood-gargling, heavens-falling passion explosion. It’s sheer spectacle. It’s fireworks and lasers and lightning and thunder. It soars and swoops and barrel-rolls,” the site said.

The song has never really gone away, covered by the English singer Nicki French in 1995, and the band Westlife in 2006. Cate Blanchett sang it while hitting Billy Bob Thornton with her car in 2001’s “Bandits,” it appeared in a wedding scene in 2003’s “Old School” and One Direction sang it in 2010 on a U.K. version of “The X Factor.”

Early life

Tyler was born — as Gaynor Hopkins — a coal miner’s daughter in public housing with an outside toilet in Skewen, Wales, about 7 miles (11 kilometers) outside Swansea. She grew up with three sisters and two brothers.

She adored the Beatles and her first album was “A Hard Day’s Night.” The first song she bought was “Hippy Hippy Shake” by the Swinging Blue Jeans at 13 and watched “Top of the Pops” religiously, according to her memoir, “Straight From the Heart.”

She would record “Top of the Pops” on a reel-to-reel two-track recorder and write down the lyrics of songs she loved. Her favorites were songs by Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.

“I used to sing them into my hairbrush for hours and hours, and that’s how it all started for me. I fell in love with singing just from doing that. Looking back, even then my voice had a husky tone to it, but I didn’t think much of it. I thought everyone’s voices were different from each other’s,” she wrote.

In 1976 she had to have surgery to remove nodules on her throat, leaving her with that trademark vocal sound. Changing her name to Sherene Davis, she was fronting a soul band when she was discovered by talent scout Roger Bell, who brought her to London for demo sessions. Then she waited for a label until RCA said it was interested.

Under her new RCA-sanctioned name Bonnie Tyler, her debut album “The World Starts Tonight” in 1977 contained her first chart hit, “Lost in France,” and she was nominated for a breakthrough artists award at the Brits Awards. She then had a No. 3 hit in 1978 with “It’s a Heartache,” but soon drifted. She then signed with Sony and saw Meat Loaf perform “Bat Out of Hell” on the BBC. Impressed, she requested to work with Meat Loaf songwriter and producer Jim Steinman.

‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’

Steinman introduced her to his song “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which would become the debut single for her fifth studio album, “Faster Than the Speed of Night.” He borrowed one of the song’s lyrics — “Turn around, bright eyes” — from his 1969 musical “The Dream Engine,” written as a student at Massachusetts’ Amherst College. He told her the song was from a prospective musical version of “Nosferatu.”

“Jim liked to put down a basic rhythm track, do nine takes of the song, choose the best one and then put the kitchen sink on there, like Phil Spector used to,” Tyler told The Guardian in 2023. “He gave me a cassette to listen to in my hotel and we both preferred take two.”

Featuring E Street Band members Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums, “Total Eclipse” is a rumination on lost love: “Once upon a time there was light in my life/But now there’s only love in the dark,” she sings.

The video, a staple of early-days MTV, was shot in a frightening gothic former asylum in Surrey, where the guard dogs apparently wouldn’t set foot in the rooms downstairs where they used to give people electric shock treatment. The visuals included slow-motion tossed doves, candles, dancing ninjas, dancing greasers, Tyler in frighteningly big shoulder pads, fencers, gymnasts, wind machines and shirtless boys wearing swim goggles being doused with water.

“Faster Than the Speed of Night” earned a Grammy nomination for best rock vocal performance — losing to Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” — and Tyler got another nod for “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in the best pop vocal performance category, losing to Irene Cara’s “Flashdance — What a Feeling.”

After the ‘Eclipse’

Tyler never reached such dizzying heights again but stayed current with such movie soundtrack singles as “Holding Out For a Hero” — from 1984’s “Footloose” — and “Here She Comes” from “Metropolis” also in 1984.

Her 2019 disc “Between the Earth and the Stars” featured duets with Rod Stewart, Cliff Richard and Status Quo’s Francis Rossi, and she ended that year performing a Vatican Christmas concert before Pope Francis.

In 2013, she switched gears to make a country-flavored record in Nashville, “Rocks and Honey,” which included the Vince Gill duet “What You Need From Me” and a little ballad called “Believe in Me,” written by American songwriter Desmond Child and British songwriters Lauren Christy and Christopher Braide. “Believe in Me” was picked to represent the United Kingdom at that year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden.

“It was an absolutely wonderful atmosphere there,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 2023. “I was being interviewed every 15, 20 minutes, and when I walked out onstage behind the British flag, I thought the roof was going to come off! It was awesome, just awesome!”

In 2017, she joined Joe Jonas’ band DNCE for a performance on the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas as part of a “Total Eclipse Cruise.” When the moon passed in front of the sun, they played “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Tyler was married to property developer and former Olympic judo competitor Robert Sullivan.