I remember watching an interview with actor Sam Neill, who has died aged 78, saying “Good screen acting hints at secrets. At other lives underneath the veneer.”

At the time, I wondered what were these secrets Neill was referring to.

I just had to look at the vast body of Neill’s work, the characters he played, and how he played them to answer that question.

Claiming him as Australian

The actor was born Nigel John Dermot Neill in 1947 in Northern Ireland before moving to New Zealand as a child. In the time-honoured tradition of Australia claiming New Zealand talent as our own, it was when he made the move across the pond that he first found fame and the launching pad for his international career.

A law school dropout, he soon found acting to be his calling while at university, acting in a number of plays before moving to New Zealand television and his first starring role in the action thriller feature Sleeping Dogs (1977).

This film got him noticed in Australia where he picked up a small role in television series The Sullivans before landing his first major motion picture – My Brilliant Career (1979), opposite another emerging talent of the Australian screen, Judy Davis.

He made a plethora of less widely known films like Just Out of Reach (1979) and Attack Force Z (1982), while also appearing in television shows such as Young Ramsey.

His international break out film was, unusually, playing the son of Satan in the quite schlocky Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981).

But the film was commercially successful, and the role opened up many doors for Neill who spent the rest of his professional career criss-crossing continents and acting in films and television series in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and his original home, New Zealand.

As often happens with our Australian talent, they have to be recognised overseas before we recognise them back home.

So back in Australia we came to embrace Neill in landmark films such as playing Micheal Chamberlain opposite Meryl Streep in Evil Angels (1988) and opposite a young Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989).

At this time, he met with producer Cubby Broccoli to be considered as the replacement for Roger Moore in the James Bond series, but unfortunately lost out to Timothy Dalton.

Neill may have been the greatest Bond we never had.

The actor who didn’t show he was acting

Perhaps the role he is best remembered for is as the star of the original Jurassic Park (1993) and sequels Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), where he played renowned palaeontologist Alan Grant.

This role is a great example of how refined his acting talents were.

At the beginning of Jurassic Park, Grant is quite aloof and cold to those around him, and visibly uncomfortable around the park owner’s grandchildren. As the drama unfolds, Grant gradually shifts to becoming the children’s protective mentor risking his life for them.

Neill doesn’t do this through dramatic speeches or over-the-top visual displays. Instead he gives us a performance of subtle shifts in the character’s behaviour.

Neill’s ability at nuance made his roles so believable and authentic.

When we view his body of work, we can see Neill’s characters always have a significant level of intellect and astuteness. He was often cast in roles of men of intelligence, quiet authority or class. Neill was the reasonable, decent man everyone looked at for stability and strength when disaster fell, and all others were losing their heads.

He had this understated quality to many of his roles. Not being the overt method actor like many of his generation, he chose restraint and reason, embellishing his characters with a feeling of genuine realism.

Neill was able to relate emotion through slight facial expressions or minute vocal inflections. He could be equally delighted, menacing or upset with just a glance.

The quality of the man

Neill took many risks with the roles he took on. His versatility and range meant he could be equally good in a historical drama (Sirens, 1994) as he was in a comedy (Death in Brunswick, 1990) or even horror (In the Mouth of Madness, 1994) and sci-fi (Event Horizon, 1997).

It shows the quality of the man that Neill was as willing to appear in blockbusters as he was in small, independent films, to help and coach the next generation of filmmakers.

In ironic casting, the Sam Neill who dropped out of law school to become an actor played his final role as a lawyer, in the acclaimed three seasons of the Australian courtroom series The Twelve (2022–25).

In 2023, Neill said “I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me”.

For him it may have been annoying. Those who admired him will be meeting this moment with profound sadness and gratitude for the exceptional work he leaves behind.

Neill uncovered the secrets in the lives of all of his characters, presented them to us in his own inimitable style and made even the most ordinary moments feel quietly extraordinary.

Daryl Sparkes, Senior Lecturer, Media Studies and Production, University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It was May 1999 and Derryn Hinch had been called into the manager’s office at Adelaide’s 5DN. The ratings for his morning program had been tumbling, and after less than a year on air he was told to pack his things.

At the time, I was writing a profile of him for The Australian newspaper and happened to be in his office as he gathered his belongings. He told me that after the station manager broke the news he responded with two demands: the biggest possible payout, and the right to tell the press the truth about why he’d been sacked.

According to Hinch, 5DN offered him an “out” to give to the media. The station was happy to say he’d resigned to write a book. But Hinch was having none of it. “Nothing annoys a journo more than being bullshitted,” he said.

As well as being the “human headline”, Hinch was known for his towering ego and unfailing tabloid news sense. But those who knew him well also say he was a straight shooter, immensely likeable and, as he demonstrated after his fifth sacking in seven and a half years, also disarmingly self-deprecating.

“I’ve been to more stations than the Southern Aurora,” he joked.

Principled, in his own way

I first met Hinch in the early 1990s in the studios of Channel Ten, where he’d taken his eponymous current affairs program after it had been dropped by Channel Seven. He let me observe the production process for a documentary for Radio National’s Media Report.

Frankly, some of what I saw behind the scenes was shocking, including one of the program’s reporters faking footage because they’d got to a story late and missed the action they were there to cover.

But the most memorable moment was sitting next to Derryn as he wrote his tub-thumping nightly editorial with which he famously began each show.

That night he was accusing a judge of being too lenient because he’d given a sex offender a light sentence. As I watched him pounding away on the keyboard, I noticed his source was a three-paragraph news brief on a ripped-up piece of newspaper sitting on his desk.

I questioned whether he knew enough about the case to be so judgemental? Perhaps the judge might know more about the circumstances of the case than he did? Perhaps a light sentence was appropriate in this case?

No way, replied Hinch. Too many judges are too lenient, they all need to toughen up, too many offenders are getting away with appalling crimes. I asked whether he had sought a comment from the judge himself. Of course not, he replied, there’s no point doing that, they won’t talk to the Hinch program.

That was Hinch. Endlessly outraged and untroubled by the norms of balanced or considered reporting. But also principled in his own way, especially on the issue of sex crimes and the abuse of children.

It was the cause for which he was imprisoned in 1987 for contempt of court after disclosing the prior convictions of paedophile Catholic priest Michael Glennon, who was then facing trial. He was also convicted of contempt of court in 2011 after defying several suppression orders, and sentenced to home detention. And he was convicted again in 2014 for detailing the criminal history of the man who murdered Melbourne woman Jill Meagher.

Hinch’s friend and colleague Steve Vizard – who regularly impersonated Hinch as a bearded zealot crying “shame, shame, shame” down the barrel of a camera – told ABC Radio today that Hinch’s disregard for the legal process increased the possibility of guilty sex offenders walking free.

“If you derail a trial you’re inflicting your own verbal punishment in substitute to proper legal punishment,” he said.

However ill-conceived it was, Hinch’s commitment to the cause was heartfelt and drove his move into politics at the age of 72 as a senator for Victoria between July 2016 and June 2019.

A series of short-lived stints

Hinch was born in New Zealand and worked for the Taranaki Herald before moving to Australia to become police roundsman for the Sydney Sun. He later edited the paper after 11 years working in the United States and Canada.

In 1978 he worked for Melbourne radio station 3XY before joining 3AW as the morning presenter the following year.

In 1987, Seven’s then owner Christopher Skase walked into his office and told him “I want to make you the Walter Cronkite of Australia”. The idea appealed to Hinch’s outsized ego and soon his racy current affairs program was born.

In 1992 he moved to Network Ten, but that only lasted two years before he was recruited by Nine to present the Midday Show.

Sacked after just a year, he moved to 2GB, which also fell apart quickly, as did a stint at Melbourne’s Gold FM and then Adelaide’s 5DN.

His ratings in Adelaide had fallen to just 4.5%, suggesting he’d either lost his once-famous tabloid news sense or that he was too “eastern states” for Adelaide listeners.

On that occasion, Hinch was sanguine. He conceded he had no one to blame but himself, unlike his dismissal from 2GB, which he attributed to a falling out with owner John Singleton.

At the time, his longtime friend and former producer, Paul Barber, concluded that Hinch’s saturation coverage meant he had gone the way of TV personalities such as Bert Newton and Don Lane. “People become so totally over-exposed that the public become exhausted and doesn’t bother anymore, we’re all becoming Derryn’d out.”

But apparently not.

Bombastic but genuine

In February the following year, 3AW called a press conference to announce that Hinch was back, as the presenter of the station’s popular Nightline program.

At the press conference, I asked him whether he was still drinking heavily. It seemed like an appropriate question as this was the sort of thing he routinely asked others and because his excessive drinking had been a theme throughout his career. His excessive alcohol consumption would be the primary cause for the cancer and cirrhosis of his liver which led to a liver transplant a decade later.

Despite this, he assured the media he had his drinking and infamous long lunches under control.

His return to 3AW made him the surprise winner of the cash-for-comment scandal that had rocked the commercial radio industry, especially Sydney’s 2UE, and had claimed the scalp of longtime 3AW presenter Bruce Mansfield.

Hinch knew he was lucky to be back and had even accepted a smaller salary. He promised not to waste the opportunity, but it too didn’t last long.

Today, former colleagues and friends have spoken about Hinch with great fondness. They agree that unlike the fearsome public persona he once had, he was in fact extremely likeable.

Up close he was personable, a superb listener and, most endearingly, open to criticism and scrutiny. He was quite used to the rest of the media criticising him for his tabloid style and didn’t seem to mind it at all.

His longstanding and always-busy lawyer, Nic Pullen, told ABC Radio Hinch was bombastic and larger than life, but also humane and genuine. It’s these traits that makes his death at age 82 “a sad day for Australian journalism”.

Andrew Dodd, Professor of Journalism, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Melatonin is best known for helping us sleep. But a new study suggests it might have another surprising use: easing muscle and joint pain.

Produced naturally by the pineal gland in the brain at night, melatonin helps regulate the body’s sleep-wake cycle. That’s why this hormone is widely used as a treatment for insomnia and jet lag.

Sleep and pain are closely linked (poor sleep can make pain feel worse, and pain can make sleep harder). But melatonin may also reduce pain directly. Researchers believe it dampens pain signals in the brain and spinal cord, reduces inflammation, calms overactive nerves and protects cells from oxidative stress – the cellular wear and tear caused when harmful molecules build up.

In the new study, researchers combined the results of 23 clinical trials involving over 2,000 participants to identify overall patterns. These trials looked at melatonin for long-term muscle and joint pain as well as pain after surgery.

Overall, melatonin reduced both pain and sleep problems in people with chronic muscle and joint pain. But the improvements were modest. On average, pain scores fell by about nine points on a 100-point scale. That’s within the range reported for some anti-inflammatory drugs in similar studies, although the two treatments haven’t been directly compared.

Melatonin’s effects may also depend on whether people already have sleep problems or other long-term health conditions. Most of the chronic pain studies included people who already had poor sleep to begin with, but none of the trials looked at results separately for people with and without sleep issues. Because of this, it’s unclear whether melatonin works better for people who struggle with sleep or whether the effects are similar for everyone.

The findings were much less convincing for pain after surgery. Melatonin did not make a noticeable difference to pain or sleep. One analysis found a tiny improvement (about 2.5 points on a 100-point pain scale), but this is far below what would matter to patients recovering from surgery.

The benefits in chronic muscle and joint pain are modest. Based on the current evidence, melatonin should be seen as a possible add-on treatment rather than a replacement for established therapies. The evidence suggests melatonin could complement treatments such as physiotherapy, exercise and anti-inflammatory medicines rather than replace them.

What we still don’t know

There is also still a lot we don’t know. The trials in this study used a wide range of doses, from 1mg to 10mg, and the researchers couldn’t determine which dose worked best.

There were hints that longer treatment helped more in chronic pain, but this was based on only a few studies. There is also very little evidence on the effectiveness of higher doses, even though they appear safe in other studies.

Melatonin is widely used and generally considered safe for short-term use, but it can cause side-effects, such as daytime sleepiness, dizziness, headaches and nausea.

People with liver or kidney conditions, or those with autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, should speak with a doctor or pharmacist before taking it.

It is also worth noting that melatonin is regulated very differently around the world. In the US, melatonin is sold as a dietary supplement, meaning people can buy it easily in supermarkets and online without medical advice. But in the UK, melatonin is a prescription-only medicine and is only licensed for short-term sleep problems and jet lag.

For now, the findings suggest melatonin may offer modest relief for some people with chronic muscle and joint pain, particularly if poor sleep is part of the problem. It’s unlikely to replace established treatments, but it could eventually earn a place alongside them. Larger, well-designed trials will be needed before doctors can say with confidence who is most likely to benefit.

Dipa Kamdar, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, Kingston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.