Liam Neeson
Liam Neeson (born June 7, 1952, Ballymena, Northern Ireland) is a Northern Irish American actor best known for playing powerful leading men as well as action-film roles. Neeson’s imposing physique of 6 feet 4 inches (1.9 meters) helped to make him a commanding presence in such films as Schindler’s List (1993; for which he was nominated for an Oscar), Rob Roy (1995), Michael Collins (1996), Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace (1999), Gangs of New York (2002), and the thriller Taken (2008) and its sequels (2012 and 2014).
Neeson was an accomplished boxer in his early years. He abandoned that activity, however, and entered Queen’s University Belfast with the intention of studying physics and computer science. After a year he left college and worked as a forklift driver for a time, but he then began studying to become a teacher. He also took drama classes, and in 1976 he joined Belfast’s Lyric Players Theatre.
Two years later Neeson joined the prestigious Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and in 1979 he made his motion picture debut in Christiana, a religious educational film. He followed that with the role of Sir Gawain in Excalibur (1981), which led to supporting roles in such films as The Bounty (1984), The Mission (1986), and Suspect (1987). Among his television appearances were the miniseries Ellis Island and the MTV-style police-procedural series as Miami Vice, both in 1984.
Neeson’s first motion picture lead came in Darkman (1990), but the film failed to garner much notice. In 1992 he made his Broadway debut in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, costarring with Natasha Richardson. (The couple married in 1994; Richardson died in 2009 after sustaining a head injury in a skiing accident.) The production caught the attention of director Steven Spielberg, who cast Neeson as the Holocaust hero Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List. The role earned Neeson an Academy Award nomination for best actor.
After starring opposite Jodie Foster in Nell (1994), Neeson portrayed the legendary Scottish clan leader in Rob Roy and the Irish revolutionary in Michael Collins. In 1998 he appeared as Jean Valjean in a film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. That year he also returned to the stage to portray Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss in London and on Broadway. In 1999 Neeson starred as a Jedi master in Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace, the first installment in the popular series’ prequel trilogy.
In the early 21st century Neeson was cast in a series of films that continued to underscore his versatility. In 2002 he portrayed an immigrant gang leader in Martin Scorsese’s historical epic Gangs of New York. After appearing as a widower in the comedy Love Actually (2003), he portrayed zoologist and student of sexual behavior Alfred Kinsey in Kinsey (2004). Neeson went on to have supporting roles, albeit important ones, in the movies Kingdom of Heaven and Batman Begins (both 2005). Additionally, he voiced the digitally animated lion Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia series (2005 and 2008). After starring opposite Pierce Brosnan in Seraphim Falls (2006), a 19th-century tale of revenge, Neeson played an ex-CIA agent trying to recover his kidnapped daughter in Taken. His committed performance helped to make this one of his signature roles, and the film’s box-office success led to two sequels.
In 2009 Neeson provided the voice of a sorcerer in Ponyo, the English version of Miyazaki Hayao’s Gake no ue no Ponyo (2008; “Ponyo on the Cliff”). His subsequent films included Chloe (2009), in which he played a husband whose wife hires a prostitute to test his fidelity, and the action-adventure Clash of the Titans (2010), in which he played Zeus. (He reprised the role in the sequel Wrath of the Titans [2012].) In 2010 Neeson also starred in The A-Team, an action drama based on the 1980s television series, and appeared as an escaped convict in the thriller The Next Three Days. He later appeared in the thrillers Unknown (2011), as a man seeking to reclaim his stolen identity, and The Grey (2012), as a plane-crash survivor contending with the Alaskan wilderness.
In 2013 Neeson was featured in the drama Third Person as a novelist engaged in an extramarital affair. The following year he portrayed an air marshal in the action movie Non-Stop, an outlaw in the comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West, and a private investigator in the crime thriller A Walk Among the Tombstones. Neeson voiced characters in the computer-animated romps The Nut Job (2014) and The LEGO Movie (2014).
In the propulsive entertainment Run All Night (2015), Neeson was cast as a hit man, and in Operation Chromite (2016), about the Inch’ŏn (Incheon) landing during the Korean War, he played U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Neeson’s other credits from 2016 included A Monster Calls, in which he portrayed the title character, who helps a boy cope with the impending loss of his dying mother, and Martin Scorsese’s Silence, about Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan. In 2017 he starred in Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, about the FBI official known as “Deep Throat,” who acted as an informant to reporters from The Washington Post during the Watergate scandal. The following year Neeson played an insurance salesman who unwittingly becomes part of a conspiracy in The Commuter. He also appeared in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ ode to the Wild West, and in the critically acclaimed caper Widows (both 2018).
In 2019 Neeson was cast as a snowplow driver who seeks to avenge his son’s murder in the dark comedy Cold Pursuit and as a top agent in Men in Black: International. That year he also starred in the drama Ordinary Love and lent his voice to Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker. Neeson’s films from 2020 included the action thriller Honest Thief, about a bank robber who faces unexpected trouble when he turns himself in to the authorities. In The Marksman (2021) he was cast as an Arizona rancher who tries to protect a Mexican boy from members of a drug cartel. Neeson’s subsequent movies included Blacklight (2022), about an operative working for the FBI, and Marlowe, in which he starred as the titular brooding private eye created by novelist Raymond Chandler in his detective stories. In 2023 Neeson had a small role as a priest to the Southern gothic writer Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat and starred as a hit man intent on hanging up his hat in In the Land of Saints and Sinners, a film set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Among Neeson’s later theatrical roles was John Proctor in a 2002 production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on Broadway. He has also occasionally appeared in television series such as the Northern Irish hit comedy Derry Girls (2022).