Liam Neeson is 70 years old. cute giant

Director Bill Condon said, “Liam is a very talented man by nature, a natural leader. Like a gentle giant, he has an above average acting ability to express the most complex inner experiences of the characters he portrays on screen.” (“Kinsey”, “Epic: Twilight”, “Beauty and the Beast”).

“At the beginning of my career, I happened to quit acting several times because of my height. Today, no one can imagine that Liam Neeson It could be less ”- said the star in an interview with“ Tele Tygodnia ”.

Liam Neeson He was born on June 7, 1952 to a Catholic family in Northern Ireland. As a teenager, he was passionate about boxing. Training began at the age of nine. Neeson did very well in the ring – he was a three-time Northern Ireland amateur boxing champion.

“As a former amateur boxer, I have never been in a street fight because my knowledge of boxing has prevented me from any violence. All the coaches I have trained with have always told me, ‘If you find yourself in a situation like this, check where the door is now!’” When I see there is a fight It’s still brewing, I leave immediately ”, says the actor.

He studied physics and computer science at the University of Belfast, but was expelled after a few months. Later he was educated as a teacher – at St. Mary’s School of Teaching lasted only two years. However, Neeson was drawn to the stage.

He gained his acting skills in theaters in Belfast and Dublin. In 1980, director John Boorman discovered him in John Steinbeck’s play “Mice and People” and cast him in “Excalibur” about the Knights of King Arthur.

In the 1980s, Neeson began acting in Hollywood productions. In 1990, he gained popularity with the movie “Man of Darkness”, in which he played a man possessed by revenge, a distorted world.

The turning point in his life was the role of the war speculator and savior of the Jews, Oskar Schindler. “He didn’t play, it was Oskar Schindler,” said one of the women who was saved by a German businessman. Neeson earned his role in “Schindler’s List” for an Academy Award.

Immediately after the success of “Schindler’s List”, Neeson starred in the drama “Rob Roy” – the story “Scottish Robin Hood”. A year later, he played the Irish national hero in Neil Jordan’s film “Michael Collins”, for which he won the Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival, a Golden Globe nomination, and the prestigious London Evening Standard Award for Best Actor.

In the late 1990s, George Lucas cast him as the venerable Jedi master, Qui Gon Jinn, one of the main characters in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. Neeson was also the voice of the legendary lion Aslan in the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia.

In 2004, Neeson played Alfred Kinsey – the man who in 1948 irrevocably changed American culture by publishing the book Sexual Behavior in the Human Man. By interviewing thousands of people about the most intimate aspects of their lives, Kinsey freed society from the burden of secrets and shame, a society whose sexual practices were the subject of the most closely guarded taboo.

Liam Neeson tried to reconcile his film and theatrical career, because without it, he claims, he would go crazy. While playing Broadway, he met a British actress Natasha Richardson. They fell in love, got married and lived together for fifteen years. They had two sons – Michael and Daniel.

In 2009, a great tragedy befell the family. Richardson, 45, suffered a serious head injury at the Mont-Tremblant ski resort, about 120 kilometers from Montreal, Canada. The actress had an apparently minor accident. Only an hour after she returned to the room she started having a severe headache and was subsequently taken to hospital.

Unfortunately, Natasha Richardson died from a head injury sustained in an accident on a ski slope. Her husband was filming in Montreal at the time. He told Esquire magazine about the toughest days of his life.

“I go to the emergency room, there are about 70-80 people in the room – broken hands, black eyes and similar situations. For the first time in years, no one recognizes me. Not the nurses, not the patients, no one. Liam Neeson reports that I see my wife now.

Then Liam Neeson faced a terrible choice – he might agree to artificially support her vital functions or decide to disconnect her from the machine.

Two years after the tragedy, he admitted: “I think I survived because of my escaping to work.”

In recent years, Liam Neeson has become the hero of erotic films. One of the hits turned out to be a chain “taken” (The first part was written in 2008, the last in 2014) – the story of a former CIA agent, Brian Mills, who pursues the criminals who kidnapped his teenage daughter.