Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Liam Neeson
The action-film icon reflects on his sons, the grief that never goes away and marking a movie milestone.
‘‘ I believe in making hay while the sun shines. ‘‘
Liam Neeson just turned 100.
That’s not years, but movies. In December, the Irish actor, 69, finished his 100th film. “I can’t friggin’ believe it!” he says. “For the first time in my life, I can say I’m really, really proud: I’ve made a hundred movies! It’s just extraordinary.”
In a career that’s stretched across four decades, he’s played just about every role imaginable—from a pioneering sexologist ( Kinsey) to a father who scours the earth for his missing daughter ( Taken). In next year’s Marlowe, he’s the latest Hollywood star to fill the (gum)shoes of the detective Philip Marlowe.
“I believe in making hay while the sun shines,” Neeson says, speaking with Parade from his home in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. It has been 13 years since his wife, actress Natasha Richardson,
passed away after a tragic skiing accident. Now Neeson looks for joy wherever he can find it, like in the flowers out the window of the home he shares with their sons, Micheál, 26, and Daniel, 25. “My little daffodils are starting to poke their heads up,” he says.
This month, he’s onscreen in Memory (in theaters April 29), an action thriller in which he plays an assassin with Alzheimer’s disease. Memory, of course, falters for just about everyone, including Neeson, who admits he occasionally can’t remember names or has to write reminder notes to himself.
But when it comes to “things from when I was a kid, and things my mom or dad said, I can remember those very clearly.”
PIGS, PLAYS & HAY
Neeson was one of four children in a Catholic working-class family in Ballymena, Northern Ireland. “Money was hard to come by,” he says. “Even though both of my parents were working.” His father, Bernard, was an elementary school caretaker; his
mother, Katherine (“Kitty”), “helped serve up the grub for the kids at lunchtime, endlessly washing dishes” at the school for more than 30 years.
During summer and school breaks, teen Neeson worked as a builder, at a bottling factory and on his uncle’s farm, feeding pigs and cows. “It was a golden time,” he says. “Cuttin’ hay that just seemed to go on for miles.” An amateur boxer from age 9 to 17, he developed another interest when he started performing in school plays. “I’m a shy person, and I always was shy, but onstage I loved that, ‘God, people are looking at me and they’re listening to me.’ That gave me a buzz.”
But while performing had him hooked, he studied physics and math at Queen’s University in Belfast before beginning work in an architect’s office. Then one day, at age 24, he landed an audition at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, coming away with his first acting contract. Neeson eventually transitioned from stage to film, and by the early ’80s he met and moved in with actress Helen Mirren. They were together for four years, living in London, while he continued to work steadily.
After a string of films and plays, he got his big breakthrough in 1993: He earned a Tony nomination for his role in Broadway’s Anna Christie, and he starred in director Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed historical drama Schindler’s List, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. That was also the year he met his future wife, Richardson.
For the next 15 years, Neeson starred in Rob Roy, Love Actually, Batman Begins and more. Then his career shifted into yet another phase.
READY FOR ACTION
In 2006, he read the script for Taken, a thriller about a former CIA operative rescuing his teenage daughter from international sex traffickers. “It was a tight little thriller,” he says, “but I did think, This is going straight to video.” Still, he asked to be considered for it. “I said, ‘I used to box, and I’ve done a few sword fights in movies, and ridden a horse and s--t. Would you think of me for it?’ ”
The next thing he knew, he was on the set of Taken, mixing it up in fight sequences with stuntmen. “I had a blast!” he says. Still a bit dubious about the film’s commercial prospects, he was pleasantly surprised when the 2008 movie was a box-office smash, turning Neeson, then 55, into an unexpected action star. Maybe, he muses, seeing a big, older guy dishing out vengeance “gave the audience a sense of, ‘ Yeah . . . I could do this.’ ”
Just as his career hit a new high, life dealt him a terrible blow. In March 2009, Richardson, his wife since 1994, was fatally injured on a ski slope, and Neeson was left alone raising their two teenage sons. “You can put grief away, you can kind of push it to a corner, but it’s always there,” he says.
Neeson leaned into his love for his sons, watching with pride as Micheál became an actor. Micheál even changed his last name to Richardson to honor his late mother, continuing the family’s long line of maternal acting royalty. (His grandmother is Vanessa Redgrave.) Younger son Danny inherited the entrepreneurial spirit of his mom, who was a tireless AIDS activist and fundraiser. He is a co-owner of the De-Nada tequila company.
More than a decade after Richardson’s death, Neeson still isn’t in a relationship. He says a comment he made to the media in February that he’d
fallen in love while working on a film in Australia
“was bollocks! I said, ‘I fell in love, but she was taken’—that’s a joke! I’m just pretty happy on my own, to be honest.”
When he can, he pulls on his waders, ties on a fly and casts into the waters near his home. “Eight times out of 10, I catch nothing. But that’s not why I do it. All I think about is that fish and
changing flies. It’s so cleansing.”
Not surprisingly, he doesn’t rest for long. He has worked on six projects in the past 13 months. “These action movies will draw to a close at some point,” he says. “I turn 70 in June. There’s a couple more out there I’m gonna do this year, and maybe that will be it.”
Those include thrillers Charlie Johnson in the Flames, In the Land of Saints and Sinners and Retribution. To lighten things up, he’s considering resurrecting the Naked Gun comedy films with Seth MacFarlane. “People maybe think I’m dead serious, but I’m a total giggler!”
He may not be laughing all the time, or in all his movies, but he shows no signs of slowing down. “You create your own luck,” he says. “It’s not gonna come to you. You have to get out there and push yourself.”