From amateur boxer and university drop-out to Hollywood stardom, it’s been quite the journey for the boy from Co Antrim

Liam Neeson: The actor often plays tough roles but has been through adversity that would test anyone’s emotional strength

Acclaimed Northern Irish actor Liam Neeson is renowned for having a very particular set of skills, acquired over a very long career.

But before he found fame as a Hollywood star, he was a university drop-out.

Born William Neeson on June 7, 1952, he is the son of cook Katherine (Kitty) and primary school caretaker Bernard (Barney), he third of four siblings, he has three sisters, Elizabeth, Bernadette, and Rosaleen.

Liam Neeson attended St Patrick’s College, Ballymena, and later recalled that his love of drama began there and he acted in a number of school productions in his teens.

Aged nine, he began boxing lessons at the All Saints Youth Club and went on to win a number of regional titles before giving up the sport at 17.

Neeson left Queen’s University Belfast in the early 1970s without finishing his degree in physics and computer science and instead took a job in his hometown as an apprentice forklift driver for Guinness.

Liam Neeson and his career: Neeson and Stella McCusker in Black Man’s Country, 1977
Nearly four decades after enrolling at the university, he received a doctorate from Queen’s at a ceremony in New York in May 2009.

The actor said at the time that he would “finally” be able to tell his mother he graduated.

He then began studying to become a teacher and also took drama classes. In 1976 he joined Belfast’s Lyric Players Theatre and two years later the prestigious Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

Neeson made his motion picture debut in 1979 in Christiana, a religious educational film.

He followed that with the role of Sir Gawain in Excalibur (1981) where he met former girlfriend Helen Mirren and which led to supporting roles in The Bounty (1984), The Mission (1986), and Suspect (1987).

His television appearances included the miniseries Ellis Island and Miami Vice, both in 1984.

Neeson’s first motion picture lead came in Darkman (1990) and two years later he made his Broadway debut in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, co-starring with his future wife Natasha Richardson.

The production caught the attention of director Steven Spielberg, who cast Neeson as the Holocaust hero Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List (1993), a role that earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor.

Neeson and Richardson married in 1994 and had two sons, Micheál and Daniel. Richardson died in 2009 after sustaining a head injury in a skiing accident.

After starring opposite Jodie Foster in Nell (1994), Neeson portrayed the legendary Scottish clan leader in Rob Roy (1995) and the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins the following year.

In 1998 he appeared as Jean Valjean in a film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and that same year he also returned to the stage to portray Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss in London and on Broadway.

A year later, Neeson starred as a Jedi master in Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace, the first installment in the popular series’ prequel trilogy.

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 in Kingdom of Heaven and Batman Begins (both 2005) and he voiced the digitally animated lion Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia series (2005 and 2008).

Liam Neeson & his career: In one of his most famous roles in ‘Taken’
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 (2008) and its box-office sequels in 2012 and 2014.

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”).

In Chloe (2009), he played a husband whose wife hires a prostitute to test his fidelity, and in the action-adventure Clash of the Titans (2010), in which he played Zeus, reprising the role in the sequel Wrath of the Titans in 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.

He also voiced characters in the computer-animated romps The Nut Job (2014) and The LEGO Movie (2014). In Run All Night (2015), Neeson was cast as a hitman, and in Operation Chromite (2016) set during the Korean War, he played U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

His 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.

Liam Neeson & his career: As Qui-Gon Jinn in the 1999 film Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
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 has 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 same year he also starred in the drama Ordinary Love and lent his voice to Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker.

His 2020 films 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.