Liam Neeson - photo, biography, actor, news, personal life, films 2021

Childhood and youth

The actor was born in 1952 in Northern Ireland into a poor family of deeply religious Catholics. My father worked at a local school as a caretaker, and my mother worked as a cook. In addition to their son, the parents raised three more daughters. Neeson's name is derived from the Irish form William. This was also the name of the local priest, who was very respected in the city.

Liam was fond of boxing, and in his youth he even won a championship in his weight category. Theater became another passion. His creative biography began with his first leading role in a school play.

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Liam Neeson in his youth and now
But Neeson did not have enough time to study. For poor academic performance, he was expelled from Queen's University Belfast, where he studied physics and computer science. The guy worked as a driver, a forklift operator, an assistant architect, a carpenter, and at the same time went to auditions.

This is how Liam got into the theater, but played in episodes. The actor was discovered by John Boorman. The director gave Neeson a role in the Oscar-nominated fantasy Excalibur. The next stage in his career was the films “Bounty” and “Mission”.

In 1987, the young man decides that the closer he moves to Hollywood, the sooner he will achieve success. The same year, Liam starred in the film "Suspect" with ]Cher[/anchor] and Dennis Quaid.

First steps in career

After several failures, Liam Neeson moved to Dublin, where he joined the Abbey Theater troupe. During another performance, the tall and talented guy was noticed by director John Boorman. He needed an actor to play the role of a knight. And Liam Neeson fit the bill perfectly. Naturally, the guy immediately agreed to the director’s proposal. After some time, he appeared in the image of Sir Gawain in the film “Excalibur”.

It was with this film that his successful career started. Liam began to receive one offer after another. However, he was called mainly for episodic roles. But the actor did not lose heart. He accepted his fate and began actively acting in a variety of films, waiting for his chance.

Movies

The first hint of recognition is the fantastic detective story “Darkman”. The artist has been nominated for the Saturn Prize. Neeson's finest hour came in 1993. Participation in the famous drama by Steven Spielberg brought him nominations for Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA. The Volpi Cup honors Liam's transformation into compatriot Michael Collins in Neil Jordan's film of the same name. The image of a Jedi knight in the legendary “Star Wars” “cost” the actor another “Saturn”.

Later, Harrison Ford became the hero of this film saga. The colleagues worked together on Kathryn Bigelow’s historical project “K-19.” The film is based on the tragic events of the early 60s - an accident on a Soviet submarine.

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Then Neeson had a streak of luck. One famous film with the actor’s participation was followed by another: Gangs of New York, which competed for 10 Oscars, and the comedy Love Actually, which was awarded an Empire magazine award. Liam almost received a Golden Globe for the biopic Kinsey. The action film “Taken” grossed $200 million at the box office and marked the beginning of a separate franchise. The leading actor resisted the latter fact and gave in for a fee of $20 million.

Among the bright films with the star’s name in the credits are the thriller “Heat,” the detective story “Unknown,” and the superhero story “Batman Begins.” The Irish actor is also great in the role of an admiral in the action movie “Battleship.”

Viewers remember the film “Life Beyond,” where Neeson’s partner was Christina Ritchie, and the film “Chloe” with Amanda Seyfried. “The Dark Knight Rises,” starring Christian Bale, grossed over $1 billion at the box office.

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In 2017, the film “Watergate: The Collapse of the White House” was shown at the Toronto Film Festival. The actor appeared as an FBI agent who helped journalists in the investigation, which ultimately led to the resignation of the US President.

The thriller “The Passenger” is an attempt to find the answer to the question of how far a person is willing to go for the sake of his own family. In the story, Liam's character fights a lot and makes dangerous somersaults. In life, he tries to avoid acute moments.

“The Marines and martial arts experts taught me how to behave in conflict situations. And I will gladly share this knowledge with you: at the first sign of a fight, look for the door and leave. Be a coward, but be alive."

"I shouldn't have spent the night"

Liam Neeson nearly died in 2000 when his '89 Harley Davidson motorcycle collided with a deer near his home in upstate New York. According to the New York Post, "Neeson, 48, who was wearing a helmet, was thrown from his motorcycle and landed on a muddy embankment just before the bike crashed into a tree. A passerby spotted the actor, who reportedly “managed to crawl” to the side of the road. Neeson allegedly asked for a "ride home," but the witness could see he needed medical attention.

"I shouldn't have spent the night," Neeson told GQ in 2014. He recovered from his wounds, only to face another battle. "...when they took me to the hospital and gave me morphine, I thought, 'This is how I want to go, with a big f**** in the 'jar of this stuff.' And then when they give you the IV that you give yourself every six minutes... I knew I was hooked because I was counting the fucking IVs, the seconds until I could press that button and it was instant, it was high ."

Neeson has also overcome these struggles, but admits that "f*cking drugs" fuels his fears for his own children. “It's a virus. A teenager can take it and suddenly they can be connected, and it changes their lives and their families forever. This is my constant concern."

Personal life

The stately man (height 193 cm, weight 97 kg) started his first high-profile romance with the already popular Helen Mirren. The status of the actress, social and financial, weighed heavily on the relationship. Liam could not stand female dominance, and the couple broke up.

Neeson's wife was his colleague Natasha Richardson. For 15 years, his personal life was not overshadowed by scandals or affairs. They say it was truly an exemplary and strong union of two loving people. The family had two sons - Michael and Daniel.

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The eldest of the children overcame drug addiction, opened the art gallery Maison Mais Non in London, and tried his hand at cinema - he starred in the remake of his father’s favorite film “Michael Collins.” Junior produces clothes under the Pine Outfitters brand, is involved in charity work and writes music. Photos of the family periodically appear on Instagram fan accounts.

In 2009, a tragedy occurred: Natasha, while skiing on the ski slope, received a fatal head injury. Liam sat at his wife’s bedside until the last minutes, and then donated his organs for transplantation.

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Only a few years later the man began to go out with beautiful companions. True, he is in no hurry to get married. Journalists reported on Neeson's romances with Olivia Wilde and Kristen Stewart. The actor soon denied these rumors.

There is no official confirmation that Liam converted to Islam. According to his agent, Neeson simply likes the sound of Muslim prayer, but he has no plans to abandon Catholicism.

Now the celebrity lives in Millbrook, a suburb of New York, and spends his free time fishing or watching matches of the Liverpool football team. Liam has citizenship of three countries, but he considers his hometown to be the place where he was born - the city of Ballymena. The actor transferred to Northern Ireland $85 thousand received as compensation for a court decision in a libel case. For this noble act and unconditional talent, Elizabeth II made Neeson a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Bloody Sunday was a real awakening

Sectarian and political violence and unrest plagued his native land while he was growing up, but Liam Neeson did not fully grasp the extent of the crisis until Bloody Sunday in 1972. At that time he was studying at college in Belfast. "I went to my lecture on Monday morning and I thought it was strange that there were no other students - maybe there were three people in the lecture," he told the Radio Times (via the Belfast Telegraph). “So I walked out with my briefcase and was walking back to the dorm and suddenly I was surrounded by maybe 200 students screaming 'scab!' Scab! Scab! - on me! Bloody Sunday happened, students boycotted lectures, and I knew nothing about it."

Neeson has since called his "horrifying" experience a "real awakening." He realized, "I better start learning about my history." In a 2011 interview with Esquire, he said his past still informs how he talks about his. native Northern Ireland, even all these years later. “I always forget that I can still make it difficult for my family there by saying something stupid in the press. I still have to be careful. I have to be careful with my family."

Incidentally, Neeson dropped out of Queen's University but received an honorary doctorate from the institution some four decades later.

Liam Neeson now

In 2019, Men in Black: International, a reboot of the film starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, was released. In the new project, Liam plays the role of the boss of new characters in the persons of Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth.

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Liam Neeson now
Regardless of his age, Neeson continues to star in bright action films. These were the action movie with elements of the comedy “Snowblower” and the crime drama “Widows”. In the second project, the wives of the main characters, whose robber husbands died in a shootout, come to the fore. Liam's wife was the star of the TV series "How to Get Away with Murder" Viola Davis.

His son's life went downhill

Liam Neeson's eldest son, Micheal Neeson, was just 13 years old when Natasha Richardson died after hitting her head while skiing. After her untimely death, he experienced a "delayed reaction" to his mother's death. "Of course it was devastating when it happened," Micheal told the Sunday Times Styl e (via Hello! magazine). “But in my mind, subconsciously, I either repressed it or kept it deep inside. And over the next week I thought, 'Okay, get on with your life.'"

He reportedly hit the party scene hard, but by the spring of 2014, Micheal saw that "things were just starting to go downhill" and eventually sought treatment at a facility in Utah. He credits his father's work ethic for helping inspire him to turn his life around. In late 2021, Micheal paid tribute to his mother by changing his last name from Neeson to Richardson, which was approved by his Oscar-winning grandmother Vanessa Redgrave. “He wanted to keep his mother close to him because she was a wonderful actress. Absolutely wonderful,” she told The Daily Mail.

Filmography

1993 – “Schindler’s List”
1999 – “Star Wars. Episode I: The Phantom Menace"
2002 – “Star Wars. Episode II: Attack of the Clones"
2005 – “Batman Begins”
2008 – “Hostage”
2009 – “Chloe”
2010 – “Clash of the Titans”
2012 – “Battleship”
2012 – “Hostage 2”
2014 – “Air Marshal”
2015 – “Hostage 3”
2016 – “Silence”
2017 – “Watergate: The Collapse of the White House”
2018 – “Widows”
2018 – “Passenger”
2019 – “Retribution”
2019 – “Men in Black”

Great controversy

During a February 2021 press junket for the revenge film Cold Pursuit, Neeson started major controversy when he admitted to the Independent that he once actively sought to inflict violence on others after learning that one of his close friends had been raped. The incident reportedly occurred some 40 years before the shocking interview: “I asked if she knew who it was? NO. What color were they? She said it was a black man. I walked up and down the areas with [the club], hoping that someone would approach me - I'm embarrassed to say it - and I did this for maybe a week, hoping that some "black bastard" would come out of the pub and will come to me about something, you know? So I can... kill him."

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