Why is liam neeson famous

Liam Neeson met actress Natasha Richardson while acting in a play. The pair married in and had two sons. After Schindler's List and Star Wars , Neeson announced that he'd be stepping back from films to focus on family and hobbies.

According to a article in The Guardian , the busy Hollywood lifestyle was no longer something that Neeson wanted. By , he seemed like he'd finally made up his mind. I don't think I can live with the inauthenticity of movies any more. Of course, Neeson's plan to quit acting in movies never really came to fruition. As he told Entertainment Weekly that same year, he, instead, planned to take things more slowly. Unlike many of his colleagues, Liam Neeson never trained as an actor. Instead, he learned his craft on the job.

In an interview with the Belfast Telegraph , he explained how his technique developed and changed over the years. In terms of choosing roles, he begins with the script. When preparing for a role, Neeson said he tries to do as little as possible as his own head can sometimes get in the way. When most people think of Liam Neeson, they probably think of him in the action thriller Taken. As Neeson told The Irish Sun , the role marked a turning point in his career.

As Men's Journal noted, it was an unexpected career change for Neeson. Nevertheless, action films proved to be the perfect fit for the Irishman.

I love doing that myself And, as of , he's still churning out action movies, even though he's been considering retiring for a few years via Independent. In , a tragic accident changed Liam Neeson's life forever. His wife of 15 years died from head injuries after a skiing accident.

Just one year previously, Neeson had told the Belfast Telegraph his life was "content. In an interview published in in The Jakarta Post , Neeson opened up about the horrific experience. Neeson was also left as a single father left to parent their two sons.

Speaking to GQ in , he said that raising two teenage boys was tough. If Tasha was here someone could share this. Around the time of his wife's death, Liam Neeson began to tire of Hollywood yet again.

After trying to quit film acting in , he again felt the urge to spend less and less time acting in movies. In many ways, this shift was something that came with success. Fame, it seems, became more and more tiring. So, Neeson explained, he split his time between movies and theater for some variety and some much-needed peace from the speed of Hollywood acting. Neeson claimed his first leading role in the superhero thriller Darkman However, it was his performance in Steven Spielberg 's Schindler's List , about a German businessman who saved the lives of more than 1, Jews during the Holocaust, that led to wide-scale recognition and an Academy Award nomination.

In , Neeson starred in Kinsey as the titular pioneering sexologist, earning a Golden Globe nomination for his work. The following year, he returned to the superhero genre as arch villain Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins , and voiced Aslan the lion for the first of three film adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia.

With Taken , in which he portrays an ex-CIA operative on the hunt for his daughter, Neeson made a late-career turn toward action hero.

He maintained that take-no-prisoners persona through two sequels, as well as in films like Unknown and the survival epic The Grey During this time, the actor also starred in the remake of Clash of the Titans and its sequel, and in a remake of the popular s TV series The A-Team A busy for Neeson included a headlining role in the murder-mystery The Commuter and prominent parts in the heist flick Widows and the western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

He opened with a patented butt-kicking role in Cold Pursuit , a performance colored by his admission that he had once considered avenging a friend's rape by fighting a random black man. In , Neeson married English actress Natasha Richardson, with whom he had two children.

It was his role in Shining Through as a high Nazi party official that got him noticed by Steven Spielberg , and that eventually led to him being cast as Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List Neeson used to sneak into the church in his hometown, Ballymena, and watch Paisley preach.

It was acting but it was also great acting and stirring too". On March 16, , his wife Natasha Richardson suffered a brain injury in a skiing accident. On March 18, , she died in a hospital. Neeson interrupted filming of his movie Chloe to be by her side. Received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Queen's University of Belfast, at the British consulate on May 6, , in New York.

Neeson later appeared on stage as John Proctor in a production of "The Crucible," a role played by Day-Lewis in the film version of the play. Regarding some rumors saying that he "felt like a puppet while working on Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace ," Neeson said, "That's simply not true," and that he had "absolutely no misgivings" about being in "Star Wars," adding that Lucas was "very good" to work with.

Is a huge fan of boxing and said that Muhammad Ali was the most famous boxer he ever met. Was an amateur boxer, a sport he started participating in at the age of 9.

He had his last fight at age Originally planned to become a teacher before discovering acting. Started acting in his early twenties, upon joining the Belfast Lyric Players' theater. Admitted in that he'd had to quit alcohol after having begun to quietly drink heavily following Natasha Richardson 's death in , eventually drinking up to two to three bottles of wine per night. Of those, Schindler's List is the only one to have won the award.

For a couple of years, he was the original choice to play the lead role in Lincoln , which would have reunited his partnership with Steven Spielberg after their massive success with Schindler's List However, due to the many delays with the filming, Neeson felt he was too old for the role and he turned it down. It went to Daniel Day-Lewis , who won his third Oscar for the role.

Lee ended up passing away on Neeson's birthday, June 7. Was scheduled to produce a television miniseries based on the early years of the IRA based on the Leon Uris book Trinity. After first meeting on the set of Excalibur , Neeson and Helen Mirren lived together for four years, after which time Mirren met husband-to-be Taylor Hackford when he directed her in White Nights He and Catherine Zeta-Jones were so frightened by the set of the film The Haunting that neither of them wanted to film there after dark.

Dated Barbra Streisand from to Is a longtime supporter of the legalization of abortion in Ireland. Phil Coulter composed a song for his wedding. Liam Neeson voiced several tracks on Coulter's CDs. An advertisement for a tall man started Neeson's career as an actor, when he saw a theatre in Belfast advertising for a tall man.

As he was 6-foot-4 and weighed 15 stone, he applied and got the job which saw him making his theatre debut playing Irish trade unionist Big Jim Larkin at the age of I never did think of myself as handsome--terribly attractive, yes, but not handsome. 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. No, I don't get obsessed with acting. Because in the past when I have got obsessed about it, it really got in the way of the creative process. I've learned to hang the character on the coat-peg at the end of the day, and when I leave in the morning I pick it up again.

And I had to work at that because the other way lies a strange sort of madness. My wife said that? Well, I guess I am. It takes a lot to get me riled. I think you become bland and predictable without the stress and angst. There's a certain lethargy that sets in. 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. Some mornings you wake up and think, "Gee, I look handsome today. I wanna go back to Ireland and drive a forklift". Acting is invigorating. But I don't analyze it too much. It's like a dog smelling where it's going to do its toilet in the morning.

In Los Angeles, it's like they jog for two hours a day and then they think they're morally right. That's when you want to choke people, you know?

I grew up in Northern Ireland, of course. Lived all through the Troubles; saw violence, the results of violence, at first hand. It's always terrified me and fascinated me. So it was a gut reaction, something about how that rage can eat you alive.