It’s easy to shove grief under the carpet... Dad did

Liam Neeson and his son Micheál on their new film that mirrors the real-life tragedy they endured – and why it may open doors between them in the grieving process

Liam Neeson and his son Micheál have worked together before, in last year’s Cold Pursuit. Micheál, fittingly, played the tiny but essential role of Liam’s character’s son, almost immediately to be killed, but thus setting the scene for the film’s vigilante drama of revenge.

This summer, though, they can be seen exploring their family relationship far more profoundly in Made In Italy, a sweetly poignant comedy-drama about a father, Robert, and his estranged son Jack, who travel to Tuscany to sell the house they have inherited from Robert’s late wife. She had died many years earlier when Jack was small, although Jack and his father have rarely talked about her since. Nevertheless, the reverberations of her loss have defined their relationship.

The film mirrors their own family tragedy, of course. Liam’s wife, and Micheál’s mother, Natasha Richardson, died after a skiing accident in 2009, aged just 45, when Micheál was 13. Given the subject matter of the film, working with his son must have brought a special depth to the experience for Liam. ‘Our relationship was very professional,’ he tells me in a video call from his home in upstate New York. ‘I spoke to Micheál before we started shooting to say, “Look, there’s only one governor on this set, and that’s not me, it’s the director, James D’arcy. If there’s anything you want to ask me about acting or whatever, let’s talk at lunch or after we finish shooting.”

‘But that never really arose – we just had a good working relationship. We were both playing a part – it’s called acting – but I didn’t have to do any particular exercise in order to act the fact that he’s my son, he just is.’ He stops for a moment. ‘There were certain emotional scenes in the film that we both felt we could do without intellectualising them, areas that we were going to have to get into that we could call upon with a certain amount of ease, let’s put it that way.’

The premise of the film, therefore, cannot be accidental. ‘I’m not going to say it was cathartic, that’s too easy and too hippie,’ he says. ‘But I do think that it will maybe help at some stage to open a door to our conversations about a number of things. I hope so.’

From his apartment in New

York City, Micheál agrees that the tragedy of his mother’s death is one the family has found simply too difficult to talk about at times. ‘It’s very easy to shy away from the grieving process,’ he says. ‘It’s so painfully difficult to lose somebody close to you that sometimes the easiest thing to do is to shove it under the carpet. That’s what my dad did. I’m still trying to figure it out myself. The one useful thing I’ve learned is to keep the person in your mind and honour them in whatever way you can.’

Liam should not have been surprised when Micheál told him he wanted to try his hand at acting. After all, not only is he the son of an Oscar nominee (Liam was nominated for Schindler’s List in 1993), but he’s a scion of the legendary Redgrave acting dynasty that includes his late mother and her sister, as well as their mother Vanessa Redgrave and her father Sir Michael.

A particularly significant way Micheál has chosen to remember his mother is to adopt Richardson as his stage name. ‘I use it to honour my mother and my Aunt Joely, it’s the best way of keeping Mom close to me. I could have taken Redgrave but it was already taken by Michael and I couldn’t do that to my great-grandfather. But my mom did start a family of her own and I feel it represents her and also my grandfather Tony Richardson.’ Natasha and Joely’s father was a double Oscar-winning director.

However, Liam admits that when Micheál chose his career path, at first his emotions were mixed. ‘I felt a little upset. If only because I know the figures about the profession, which are pretty much the same in America as in Europe. All the time, 65-70 per cent of actors are out of work. But Micheál has… a presence,’ he says. He pronounces his son’s name Michael in the English fashion, although the spelling is Irish. He says he only says it the Irish way, ‘Mee-haul’, when he’s being stern. ‘There were certainly a couple of instances when we were filming Made In Italy last year, when he was 23, that I remember thinking, “I couldn’t have done that at his age.”’

He stops himself, wary

‘My mother would have been thrilled I’m an actor’ MICHEÁL RICHARDSON

of sounding too enthusiastic. ‘But I can’t say I’m glad we did it: it’s not as simple as that. Acting is a craft and you can spend years at it. I’m still learning, and Micheál will continue to learn. I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen so far, though. We shall see.’

Having been both mother and father to Micheál and his younger brother Daniel for 11 years now, Liam says it’s not so much the financial aspect of acting that he worries about as the emotional. ‘It’s a profession about rejection. Auditions are hard to get, and if you’re lucky enough to get one and then you don’t get the part, that’s very tough. Because it’s not about the education you had, or the college you went to – you didn’t get the part because of you. That is very, very hard to come back from. So you have to develop a tough skin, and yet you also have to keep a sensitivity for the work if and when you get it. Purely as a father, I didn’t want my son to go through that.’

Micheál agrees that his decision to go into acting was one his father had reservations about. ‘There wasn’t one big sit-down conversation, I didn’t have to convince him to “allow” me as such, because he had seen my passion for it. But I think if the conversation had been with my mother, she would have been thrilled – she’d know that I was carrying on the legacy and discovering it for myself.’

What about the rejection that his father worried about? ‘You handle rejection every day,’ he says with a shrug. ‘It’s part of the process. You develop a thick skin because it’s essential. The thing is that, yes, I do come from this big family of actors but I’m a very different person, so it feels like I’m starting from scratch and figuring it out myself.’

Different or not, he is close to his mother’s family, particularly his granny Vanessa. ‘Obviously, the older I get the more I realise who she is and what an impact she’s had on the acting world. But just as a granny, she’s so loving and amazing.

‘I did a play off-broadway earlier this year and she flew out to see me. She came on the final night but she left it as a surprise because she didn’t want me to be flustered. Afterwards she met all the cast and the crew, and it meant a lot to everybody there to have Vanessa Redgrave just pop in!’

She hasn’t popped in recently, of course. Since the lockdown began Micheál’s been living alone, and at 25 and single he admits he’s beginning to get restless. ‘It’s hard for us single people,’ he says. ‘I do have a few friends who’ve found girlfriends, which is inspiring me a bit, but at the end of the day we still have to be diligent, no matter how lonely we get. It’s not that interesting though.’

Meanwhile, out in upstate New York, his father is having a very different experience. After teasing the world earlier this year that he had an ‘incredibly famous’ girlfriend whose identity he was protecting (he later let on this was a joke), he says he’s also single and home alone, the difference being that he’s content.

‘Look, I’m in a house I own – unlike millions of Americans. I know where my next meal is coming from, so I’m very fortunate. I have a gym, an outdoor swimming pool. I go to bed when I want, I get up when I want, I eat when I want. I’m very content with not seeing anybody. I don’t know how long that’s going to last, but at the moment I’m very, very content.’

‘I’m very content with not seeing anybody at the moment’neeson LIAM

Liam with Natasha in 2006