Sam Neill's co-star claims he had pneumonia shortly before his death

Sam Neill's Hunt for the Wilderpeople co-star Rima Te Wiata has claimed that he had been sick with pneumonia shortly before he died.

The Jurassic Park actor passed away in Sydney, Australia on Monday at the age of 78, with his family revealing his death "was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer-free".

Speaking to the New Zealand Herald about her late friend and co-star, Te Wiata revealed that Neill had been sick with a lung infection in recent months.

"It really sucks, actually," she said. "As (Neill) said once in the press... he's not scared of death but he would be annoyed... he would be like 'Oh, for goodness' sake, I got over my cancer and now look... now I've got pneumonia. What next?' But he's on his big journey now."

Neill and Te Wiata played husband and wife Hector and Bella in Taika Waititi's 2016 film Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

The Event Horizon actor was diagnosed with a type of blood cancer in 2022, and he announced in April this year that he was cancer-free.

In a separate interview with ABC Radio Sydney, Neill's former partner Laura Tingle shared that the cancer treatments had taken a toll on his body and he'd "been pretty sick".

"The bottom line is he'd been fighting various forms of cancer for at least the last five years intensively," the journalist said on Tuesday. "That takes a toll on anybody's body. He'd had a lot of chemo and a lot of immunotherapy. Thankfully, it had finally cleared him of the blood cancer that he had. But that left him pretty compromised in terms of his immune system, and I think his poor old body sort of got a bit exhausted."

Tingle, who was in a relationship with Neill between 2018 and 2021, added, "He's been pretty sick for the last couple of weeks, and everybody who loved him has been willing him on from near and far, but I think it was just a bit too much to recover from one more time."

In addition, Neill previously told Australia's Daily Telegraph last month that he was using a walking stick at the premiere of his movie The Fox "because I'm going to get a new hip".

Neill's family has yet to confirm his cause of death.