In a career that’s stretched across four decades, he’s played just about every role imaginable—a homeless veteran (Suspect), a pioneering sexologist (Kinsey), an Irish revolutionary (Michael Collins), a Star Wars Jedi, a German industrialist (Schindler’s List), a tormented detective (A Walk Among the Tombstones) and a father who scours the earth for his missing daughter (Taken). In his latest, Marlowe, due out sometime next year, he becomes the latest Hollywood star to fill the (gum)shoes of the famous fictional detective Philip Marlowe—a list that includes such heavyweights as HumphreyBogart, RobertMitchum, ElliottGould, JamesCaan and JamesGarner. “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, where the sun is indeed shining. The early spring-type day, he says, shows off the lovely flowers in his yard. “My little daffodils are starting to poke their heads up through the ground. It’s terrific.” It has been 13 years since his wife, Tony-winning actress NatashaRichardson, passed away, and Neeson seeks joy where he can—like admiring the blooming flowers at the home he shares with their sons, Micheál, 26, and Daniel, 25. This month, he’s back onscreen in Memory (in theaters April 29), an action thriller from Casino Royale director MartinCampbell. He plays Alex Lewis, an assassin battling early stages of Alzheimer’s disease who becomes a target himself when he refuses to complete a job assignment from a dangerous criminal syndicate. Neeson was drawn to the project after seeing the 2003 Belgian film adaptation based on a novel, and “the story just absolutely grabbed me,” he says. Despite his struggling memory, Alex must find the people who hired him before they find him, while keeping one step ahead of the FBI agent (GuyPearce) in the middle of it all. Neeson did extensive research on Alzheimer’s and dementia for the role in order to incorporate subtle signs of the disease, like a stutter and a general vagueness; when filming started, he asked his director if he was going too far. “If you see anything that seems too much or too big,” he told him, “or if I’m putting quotation marks around this disease too much, please tell me to pull it back.” He wanted to get his portrayal of a character with early Alzheimer’s just right, perhaps in part because of his two friends back in Ireland who suffer with the disease. “You see in the film what he’s going to end up like,” says Neeson of how his character’s older brother also has late-stage Alzheimer’s. “That is going to be Alex’s fate as well.” Memory, of course, generally falters sometimes for just about everyone, including Neeson. “I have to write things down, you know?” he says. He occasionally wrestles with names. But when it comes down to cherished memories, “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 raised the third of four children in a Catholic working-class family in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, in the decade before the political conflict known as “The Troubles” broke out. “I’m not gonna say we lived in a shoebox; it was essentially a two-up two-down little terrace house,” he says. “But money was always hard to come by, even though both of my parents were working.” Neeson’s 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. His parents instilled a hard-work ethic in Neeson. Starting at age 15, during summer and school breaks, “I was either laboring on building sites or working at a bottling factory,” he says. The idea of spending off days “to lounge about? Bollocks to that.” He also worked on his uncle’s farm, feeding the pigs and cows—and as arduous as it all felt back then, “now that I look back on it, it was a golden time. Cuttin’ hay that just seemed to go on for miles.” Plus, he still had time to pursue what he loved. An amateur boxer from age 9 to 17, Neeson also took in as many movie matinees as he could, absorbing Audie Murphy Westerns and the comedies of Laurel & Hardy and the Three Stooges. At age 11, he started performing in school plays, despite his reticence at being the center of attention. “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.” Yes, he realizes it’s a bit of a paradox—the shy kid who soaked up the spotlight. And he’s still a bit shy today, or at least disinclined to boasting. “I don’t go ’round saying to someone, ‘I’m an Irish living legend,’” he says with a laugh. But while performing had him hooked, he studied physics and math at Queen’s University in Belfast. And because he couldn’t afford the drama schools he applied to, he took teacher training instead and began working as a reprographic assistant, making copies in an architect’s office. But one day, at age 24, he made a fateful phone call that changed the trajectory of his life. He reached out to Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, poking around for a possible role, and as luck would have it, the woman who answered the phone was Mary O’Malley, a famed playwright. After asking his height (he’s 6-foot-4), she set him up for an audition a week later. “I don’t think I was terribly good, but I guess she saw some sort of passion or something,” says Neeson, who nonetheless came away with his first acting contract. “I remember walking down to the train station to go back home, and my feet never touched the ground!” he says. “There were army checkpoints everywhere [at that time in Belfast] and I was shaking hands with soldiers!” Neeson eventually transitioned from stage to film, and by the early ’80s he met and moved in with actress HelenMirren. They were together for four years, living in London, while he continued to work steadily. And then, 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. Neeson also starred in Rob Roy, Love Actually, Batman Begins and other projects for the next 15 years. Then his career shifted gear into yet another phase.
Ready for Action
In 2006, he read the script for Taken, an action-revenge thriller about a former CIA operative rescuing his teenage daughter from sex traffickers who kidnap—take—her while she vacations in Paris. “It was a tight little thriller,” he says, “but I did think, This is going straight to video.” Still, when he saw the script’s co-writer, LucBesson, at a film festival that year, he asked to be considered for the role. “I said, ‘I used to box as a kid, 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 Neeson knew, he was mixing it up in Taken fight sequences with stuntmen on location in France. “I had a blast!” he says. “I really felt like a kid in a candy store.” Still a bit dubious about the film’s commercial prospects, he was pleasantly surprised when the 2008 movie was a box-office smash. It scored the best opening day up to that point for a film on Super Bowl weekend, spawned two sequels and turned Neeson, then 55, into an unexpected action star—for reasons he still can’t put his finger on. Perhaps, he says, it was seeing “this soft, sensitive, gentle giant” dispensing vengeance to the bad guys. “Maybe that gave the audience a sense of, yeah…maybe I could do this.” But 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 in a tragic skiing accident, and Neeson was left alone raising their two teenage sons. He somehow found the strength to go back to work, and “I’m still doing it,” he says. “You can put grief away, you can kind of push it to a corner, but it’s always there.” Neeson then reads a quote, one often attributed to the Irish poet JohnYeats, that describes how he feels. “‘Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy,’” he reads. “I think actually in general, that describes my countrymen.” Neeson leaned into his love for his sons, watching with pride as Micheál became an actor. Micheál even changed his last name to Richardson in honor of his late mother, continuing the family’s long line of maternal acting royalty. (His grandmother is VanessaRedgrave.) “It is definitely in Micheál’s blood,” says Neeson of his son’s passion. They starred together in Made in Italy (2020), playing a widowed father and his son grieving their shared loss. Micheál’s younger brother, Danny, inherited the gung-ho entrepreneurial spirit of Richardson, who was a tireless activist and fundraiser for the fight against AIDS. He and a business partner are co-owners of the De-Nada tequila company, which touts itself as the first tequila brand “made by millennials for millennials.” More than a decade after the loss of Richardson, Neeson still isn’t in a relationship. The buzz about how he’d fallen in love after a comment he made to the media in February—about how he was “taken” with the people and the film crew of Melbourne for a movie he’d been working on in Australia—“was bollocks!” he says. “I said, ‘I fell in love, but she was taken’—that’s a joke!” Does he want to be in a relationship? “I don’t know, I don’t know…” he says, pondering the prospect. “I’m just pretty happy on my own, to be honest.” He’s an avid reader who watches films in his home screening room, goes for “walkabouts” on his property and stays fit in his home gym; if he can’t sleep at night, he’ll sometimes get up and start riding the exercise bike at the end of his bed. But his favorite spot is “a little shed” his wife once bought him for his birthday, with a bed, pot-bellied iron stove and fly-fishing equipment. And when he gets time off, he pulls on his waders, ties on a fly and casts into the waters of the Hudson River. “Eight times out of 10, I catch nothing! But that’s not why I do it,” he says. Instead, he becomes so focused on fish and fishing, that by the time he checks his watch, “it’s three and a half hours, and all I’ve thought about is that fish and changing flies. It’s so cleansing.” Not surprisingly—for an actor who’s made 100 films—he doesn’t rest for long. He did six projects in the last 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 “couple” include another political thriller, Charlie Johnson in the Flames; he’ll play a retired assassin in In the Land of Saints and Sinners; and in Retribution, a remake of a Spanish film, he’s a bank-exec father who receives a message that his vehicle—in which his kids are riding to school—has been rigged with a bomb. To lighten things up, he’s considering resurrecting the Naked Gun comedy films with SethMacFarlane. “It’s going to be the end of my career, or certainly a hiatus,” he says with a chuckle. “People maybe think I’m dead serious, but I’m a total giggler! A kind of goofy giggler too.” Saturday Night Live fans got a glimpse of his goofiness when he hosted the long-running late-night show in 2004. He may not be laughing all the time, or in all his movies, but he keeps making hay in the sunshine of a career that shows no signs of slowing down—and one that he’s worked so hard to sustain. “You create your own luck,” he says. “It’s not gonna come to you. You have to get out there and push yourself.”
Liam Likes
Books: “Broken by DonWinslow, a wonderful crime writer. It’s the second time I’ve read it. It’s six novelettes and I’d love to make one of those into a movie at some point, if it’s possible. And I’m reading one about Christianity called Before You Say ‘I Don’t Believe’ by a gentleman named RogerCarswell.” Music: “I’m very boring. I put on Pandora. It depends on if I’m doing a little workout on the stationary bike watching CNN or something. I’ll put on some EricClapton or DireStraits; that’s my generation. Or if I’m just quietly listening to music, it would be the Enya channel.” Things He Owns a Lot of: “Fishing rods and shoes. I reckon I’ve got about 35 pairs of boots and shoes.” Secret Recipe: “I do a pretty good Irish stew. But I have a secret recipe. If I tell ya, I’m gonna have to shoot ya! Well, no, I’ll tell you. It’s the usual ingredients—if you make it with lamb or stewing steak and vegetables and stuff—and at the end, you add a bottle of ordinary Guinness, mixed with the herbs and stuff. That’s my secret.” Must-Have Sip: “Decaf black tea. I’m never without my Stanley mug of decaf tea.” Unforgettable: “The two times I met my idol, MuhammadAli. And I was able to tell him both times, ‘Muhammad, I love you.’ The second time, I was very touched, because he was very advanced in his illness and I’m some Irish American dude. And his wife very sweetly leaned in—and Muhammad did not show any expression whatsoever, God love him—but his wife said, ‘He knows who you are!’ That’s a memory I shall never forget. Ever.” Guilty Pleasure: “Lying in bed, reading. When I’m not working, I don’t fall asleep until like, 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning. But a guilty pleasure would be waking up at maybe 2:30 in the morning, or maybe 3, and having some dark chocolate or some rhubarb crumble.” Next, Author Don Winslow on the New England Mafia in His New Book City on Fire
