The Hard Luck and Beautiful Life of Liam Neeson

Actor, ass-kicker, widower, philosophizer, big man, funny man, capable drinker of pinot noir: may we introduce to you, the man you've known for all these years

By Tom Chiarella

More from this author

Nigel Parry

Originally published in the March issue

Liam Neeson and I last spoke a week before I wrote this sentence. At that time, I asked him what he remembered about the interview I'd done with him at a restaurant in New York almost three weeks before that. He said, "I remember you told me that story about your accident, and that was pretty hard for you. I remember that you made me draw that picture of my house, and I remember that we talked about Natasha. I started to worry: Why would I tell him that? Why did I speak about the hospital? And then I thought, No, he's a man. This is not some newspaper story. So I wasn't sorry. Except about your accident. That was bloody awful."

Then Liam Neeson asked me what I remembered about the interview. I echoed him: "You told me about your accident. You told me about your wife's accident. That was hard foryou. You were upset. You got very quiet. So I traded stories. I told you something bad that happened to me. I have the picture of your house right here. I remember that your hand was shaking."

"You have to be careful," he told me, "in how you describe it." I told him that was my job, to be careful with descriptions.

Just two days before that, Liam Neeson called from the Caribbean, at the end of a holiday. "I'm remembering some things I said," he told me. The phone signal was breaking up. It sounded to me like he was speaking on a satellite phone; I pictured him crouched in the body of a small plane. I scratched a note —plane? — as we spoke. "I don't know if you've written the piece yet," he said. "I don't know if you'll even remember what I'm worried about."

Neeson was concerned that we had discussed the politics of his native Northern Ireland. The Troubles. "I always forget," he told me, "that I can still make it hard for my family there by saying something stupid in the press." Then he asked to reword one point — to change one word. I told him that I didn't think the IRA would receive mention in the piece. "I still have to be careful," he said, before the phone crackled loud enough that I had to pull it away from my ear. "I have to make it my job to be careful with my family."

He didn't thank me. He didn't care if I used the quote. He just wanted to clarify that word. We made arrangements to talk in two days. Then I told him I'd seen him on TV during halftime at the Knicks — Heat game, that he looked good, that he looked happy. He told me a story about that interview, about his son, who was at the game with him. Then the phone died.

I forgot to ask him whether he was on a small plane or not.

Two weeks before, after our interview at the restaurant was over, Liam Neeson took his fourteen-year-old son to the Knicks — Heat game at Madison Square Garden, LeBron James's first game in New York since moving to Miami. They sat courtside. At the same time, I was having dinner with my son and his friend at a lousy little sushi place on Twenty-third Street. During that dinner, my brother texted me: "Your boy Liam Neeson is being interviewed at the Knicks game." So I excused myself and went to the bar for a look.

There he was, holding the same bright-blue scarf that he'd worn to our lunch. I could not hear him, but he looked happier than he had when we'd left each other. He's tall, seemingly born into a black trench coat, but thinner than he looks on television. The thing with his face is, he looks past you when he speaks. It's not that he can't make eye contact, because he can, and he does, but he reserves looking directly at you, as if the distance marauds him in particular. It makes him look perpetually concerned. This is why he played so well that stern, top-dog Greek god inClash of the Titans, the wrathful father-assassin in the surprise action-hitTaken, and how in a little over three decades, he's played every type of epic ass-kicker from Gawain to Valjean, Oskar Schindler to Michael Collins. It's the face that's still allowing him to stack up movies years ahead of time, with roles and reprises, stretching well into the coming decade. A beguiling longevity, since 1) he's fifty-eight, and 2) his wife, Natasha Richardson, died unexpectedly in an apparently benign skiing accident just two years ago. It's the look Neeson's shooting over the shoulder of the interviewer at the Knicks game, in the same interview he tells me about later, from somewhere in the Caribbean, maybe from a plane.

"I had to do it, Tom, because they gave me those tickets," he says. "Because, well, you just get nothing for nothing, right?" Neeson speaks with more brogue than you'd expect, and somehow less, so that the same word —nothing — sounds both hissed and sung in the same sentence. "And before we go on the air, the woman says to me, 'I'm going to throw you a question, something like, "Mr. Neeson, ifStar Wars is on one channel andSchindler's List is on the other, which one do you watch?"' And oh, but that gets me started. I mean, I start to tell her, one represents six million people, six million lives, the other is just, just ..." — and here he climbs the word as he says it — "fantasy! But then my boy steps in and — he's so smart — says, 'Excuse me, ma'am. Why don't you sayStar Wars on one channel andTaken on the other?' That's what made me happy. And I looked that way, because right before I went on, my son, he can see I'm still aggravated, so he just steps up to me and says, 'Smile, Dad, smile.' And that's my bonny boy. His mother just shines through him at moments like that."

1|2|3|4|5