Sam Neill was "pretty sick" in the final days before his death, his ex Laura Tingle said.Australian political journalist Tingle, 65, dated Neill from 2018 to 2021 after he separated from his wife of 28 years, Noriko Watanabe. Neill died on Monday at the age of 78 after announcing he was cancer-free in April."He'd been fighting various forms of cancer for at least the last five years intensively. And that takes a toll on anybody's body," Tingle told host Hamish Macdonald on Tuesday's episode of Sydney Mornings.She continued of his battle with a type of blood cancer, angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, "He'd had a lot of chemo and a lot of immunotherapy and, thankfully, it had finally cleared him of the blood cancer that he'd had, but it left him pretty compromised in terms of his immune system and I think his poor body sort of got a bit exhausted, as makes sense. So, 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."When Macdonald noted Neill's poignant 2023 interview with ABC's Australian Story, in which he admitted he was not afraid of dying but would be "annoyed" as there were still things he wanted to do, Tingle stated that he very much felt that way in the days before his death."I think that was definitely where he was," Tingle explained, celebrating his zest for his career. "He loved to work. He was largely defined by being on a movie set. He used to say, 'I'm addicted to working.' And I think he was."Tingle said industry work was "substantial" to Neill, best known for starring in movies like Jurassic Park (1993) and TV shows like Merlin (1998), and that he loved the challenge of filming."When he, by his own admission, fell into acting, that sort of sense of being always on the move, always becoming somebody else, was just such a large part of who he was," Tingle said, "and he was so good at it."