Liam Neeson – the Unlikely Irish Box Office Champion

If you look back at his last few movies – The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (grossed at least $290 million), Batman Begins ($205 million) and Star Wars – Episode I: Phantom Menace ($430 million) – that’s a total of nearly one billion dollars worth of tickets. Granted he wasn’t the leading man in those movies, but that’s mightily impressive in an industry that judges you on your last box office figures.

He will next be seen as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s next movie – reuniting them again more than ten years after Schindler’s List – and he will also again provide the voice of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Not bad for someone who was Youth Heavyweight Champion of Ireland for three consecutive years, but originally wanted to be a butcher.

William John Neeson was born on 7th June, 1952, the third child and only boy among four siblings in a working-class Catholic family:

“There was never a lot of money floating around. But there was always food on the table.”

Ballymena was a predominantly Unionist town, but “the troubles” didn’t seem to affect Neeson greatly, as most of his friends were Protestants:

“I think I realized there were two communities in Northern Ireland when I was about nine or 10, not because there was any trouble but because in certain years my parents would keep us indoors on the 12th of July. I couldn’t figure that out, because all my mates were out dancing in the streets and I wanted to go out and join them. So it was then that I sensed a “them and us” attitude.”

However, on being offered Freedom of the Town of Ballymena by the Borough Council in 2000 he commented he had felt like a “second-class citizen” in the town, and the offer was withdrawn.

Growing up it was his English teacher who encouraged him to take to the stage, and his first role was in local amateur drama company the Slemish Players. His performance in Philadelphia, Here I Come won him a Best Actor award at the Larne Drama Festival, and the world of butchers and boxing soon faded away.

He studied at Queen’s University in Belfast for a short while, but dropped out and returned to Ballymena. He had various jobs including a truck driver and a forklift operator at Guinness before attempting teacher training at St. Mary’s College on the Falls Road. He was only there two years, but he did meet a number of people who were interested in acting and became sure that this was what he wanted to do with his life.

His last role for the Slemish Players was memorable – he played Tapioca, one of the Ugly Sisters, in the Cinderella Christmas pantomime – and then passed the audition at the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast and become a professional actor. After two years with the Lyric Players Neeson moved to Dublin, and joined the Abbey Theatre in 1977. Several years after this move, director John Boorman saw him in Of Mice and Men and offered him the part of Sir Gawain in what became Arthurian cult movie, Excalibur.

Next was the inevitable move to London, and after several years working in stage, small budget movies and TV series he decided to give Hollywood a shot in 1987. His portrait of a deaf-mute in Suspect immediately woke up the critics, but it wasn’t until his lead role in Darkman that the public wanted his name in bright lights.

Success was still elusive though, and the media started to focus more on his famous girlfriends – he dated Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts, Brooke Shields, Barbra Streisand and singer SinÃ?©ad O’Connor – rather than his acting:

“I never did think of myself as handsome, terribly attractive yes, but not handsome.”

Hollywood was quickly losing its appeal, and in 1993 he accepted an invitation from Natasha Richardson to co-star in the Broadway play, Anna Christie. The play was a huge success and brought Neeson his first Tony Nomination for Best Actor, and a lasting romance: he and Richardson married a year later and now have two children, Michael and Daniel.

Impressed by his performance in Anna Christie, Steven Spielberg offered him the coveted role of Oskar Schindler in his upcoming movie Schindler’s List. Apparently Spielberg’s mother-in-law spoke to Neeson after the show, and he had hugged her when he saw she was still crying from the final scene: Spielberg later decided that this was exactly what Schindler would have done, and gave him the role. Neeson repaid the favor, giving a performance that won him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and secured the movie the #3 position on the American Film Institute’s 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time:

“Before Schindler’s List, I wouldn’t have believed movies had a lot of power for social change. But having seen what happened with Schindler’s List, and touring the world with it, it really made me realize the power of images.”

His success now moved him into the world of bigger and better movies including Husbands and Wives, Rob Roy and especially Michael Collins, the story of the legendary Irish revolutionary that he and director Neil Jordan had waited ten years to make. It was rumored that he was considered for the legendary part of James Bond in GoldenEye, but Michael Collins went on to earn him further critical acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination.

He became part of a worldwide phenomenon anyway when he took the part of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s mentor, Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, in George Lucas’s Star Wars – Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999, and received the ultimate movie accolade – being made into a Star Wars action figure – as part of the process. It was a mixed experience though: he was rumored to have been so keen to do the movie he didn’t even read the script, but afterwards said that shooting the effects-heavy movie made him “feel like a puppet”.

That same year, Neeson was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, though fellow Irish actor Gabriel Byrne in his book Pictures in My Head recalls how Neeson was still an ordinary man:

“We sit by the pool, reminiscing about Dublin and actors we knew then, and the characters and the humor. Laughter and talk, drifting like smoke across the hills. He excuses himself. After a while I wonder where he is. Ellen goes to investigate. She comes to the door smiling, her finger to her lips, bidding me to be quiet. There at the sink, washing the dishes, whistling. The lovely man from Ballymena. We watch him for a long time, lost in his task.”

Sadly, a motorbike accident in Connecticut – he hit a deer while riding his Harley Davidson motorcycle and suffered a fractured right pelvis, chipped left pelvis and multiple abrasions – meant that he was unable to appear in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, and only his voice was used instead.

His major passion these days is fly-fishing, which he learned while filming the movie Nell with Jodie Foster, but he’s never lost touch with his roots and now serves as Patron to the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, years after he first joined them:

“Some mornings you wake up and think, gee I look handsome today. Other days I think, what am I doing in the movies? I wanna go back to Ireland and drive a forklift.”