Liam Neeson is one of the toughest and quintessential action actors in Hollywood, he turned 70 years old. Learn more about his career!
Photo: EFE/JOERG CARSTENSEN

Of his seven decades, Neeson has maintained a relationship with acting for almost sixty years , since, at the age of eleven, he participated in a school play, as published by GQ in 2014, to impress a girl.

At that time, Neeson went to school in Ballymena, the city where he was born on June 7, 1952. His mother Kitty was a kitchen assistant at a school and his father was also a school janitor and they had four children.

“How would you describe my childhood? Normal, she would say. Raised in a working-class Irish Catholic upbringing ,” the actor said in a video for Unicef, an organization for which he is a goodwill ambassador .

“Everything revolved around school: amateur boxing, sports after school. “The most beautiful memories were working on my uncle’s small farm in the summer.”

Aside from these memories and the normality with which he describes his childhood, the actor did not ignore the conflict that Ireland was going through at the time.

“I grew up in a small town in the north of Ireland. We went through a 30-year war, euphemistically known as ‘The Troubles’ that began in 1968 and ended in 1998,” Neeson recalled.

Raised in a Catholic environment, the actor was an altar boy and, according to what he told CNN, for a few months he fantasized about the idea of ​​being a priest.

However, reality took him down another path, that of sport. Specifically, boxing. “I was nine years old and I was at mass on a Sunday morning and our parish priest, Father Darragh, announced from the pulpit: ‘I’m setting up a boxing club on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at seven-thirty in the afternoon’ or something. So. Send your boys. And they sent me,” the actor told the British edition of the Huffington Post in 2014.

At eleven years old he began competing and around six years later he participated in his last fight.

Finally, he abandoned boxing because it increasingly required time that he could not dedicate between studies and amateur acting. 

“And I thought, ‘If I can’t put in the time, that’s when you hurt yourself.’ So I retired with dignity.

 At that time he knew that he was a competent boxer. He wasn’t great. He was competent. I won some titles. “He had a good straight left.”

Later, he entered Queen’s University Belfast to study Physics and Computing, but dropped out after a year.

In 1976 she joined the Lyric Players Theater in Belfast and two years later joined the Abbey Theater in Dublin. In 1978 she made her film debut with “Pilgrim’s Progress.”

Photo. EFE/KIKO HUESCA 

THE DEATH OF NATASHA RICHARDSON

This title was followed by others such as “Excalibur”, in 1981; “The Bounty”, in 1984; “The Mission”, in 1986; “The Darkman”, in 1990 and “Leap of Faith”, from 1992, among others.

In 1993, came the role that would end up giving him international recognition, that of Oskar Schindler in “Schindler’s List”, for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

His extensive filmography includes films such as “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace”, “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones”, “Gangs of New York”, “Batman Begins”, “Taken”, “The Dark Knight Rises”, “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” or “Silence”.

In 2009, Neeson had to deal with the death of his wife, actress Natasha Richardson , whom he had married in 1994, after a fall during a ski class.

“I think I survived by running away a little bit. Running away to work,” she told Esquire in 2011. “It’s pretty easy to plan jobs, plan a lot of work. It is effective. But that’s the strange thing about grief, you can’t prepare for it.

You think you’re going to cry and get it over with. You make those plans, but they never work out.” The couple had two sons, Micheál and Daniel.

Photo: EFE/PETER FOLEY

In 2019, the actor caused controversy by remembering in an interview how decades ago he had gone to some areas looking for a fight to kill any black man, after learning of the rape of a friend of his by a black man.

During the interview he said he felt ashamed; The next day, in another interview, this time televised, he denied being racist and later apologized for his comments.

A year earlier, in 2018, Neeson said that accusations of sexual abuse in the entertainment industry that followed the outbreak of the MeToo movement were becoming “kind of a witch hunt.”