Following the death of Natasha Richardson in 2009, Liam Neeson overcame the blow by retraining himself into an action hero who deals with loss in all of his films. He will do it again this month in 'The Ice Road', for which Netflix has paid a record price
In mid-March 2009, Liam Neeson received a call from his wife, actress Natasha Richardson. She had gone skiing for a few days while he was filming in Toronto and during a class she had fallen. According to her she said, there was nothing to worry about: it had been a small accident without importance. Neeson never heard her voice again.
Hours after that conversation, she was taken by ambulance to a Montreal hospital after feeling disoriented. When the actor arrived at the hospital after leaving his twelve and thirteen-year-old children in the care of his grandmother, the legendary Vanessa Redgrave, he found the love of his life engulfed in a sea of tubes. He had suffered a stroke and his condition was brain dead.
“I went to her side and told her that I loved her,” he recalled during a 2014 interview with Anderson Cooper. "I told him, 'Honey, you're not going to get out of this. You have hit your head. I don't know if you can hear me. We will take you back to New York and all your family and friends will come to see you off." Neeson and Richardson had made a promise to each other: if either of them found himself in an irreversible life situation, the other would not allow himself to be artificially sustained. He signed the disconnection and his organs were donated. Neeson, with two teenage children, had become his Love Actually character. In that widower is unable to deal with the death of his great love.
The couple had fallen in love while playing the Anna Christie drama at the theater. He was almost a newcomer and she was a member of a dynasty of actors with more than a century of tradition behind her. At the time, Richardson was married to producer Robert Fox, but their chemistry was so deep that a year later they were married and shooting their first film together, Nell (1994), opposite Jodie Foster. Fresh from an Oscar nomination for Schindler's List, Neeson was in the prime of his life.
But in the spring of 2009, at the foot of a New York hospital bed and after the death of his wife, grief took over him, and his first decision was to get off a project he had been working on for four years: the Lincoln that was going to reunite him with Steven Spielberg after Schindler's List. The director understood. The man who had been preparing for one of his most coveted roles for almost five years was no longer there.
According to what he confessed, after the trauma he took refuge in alcohol and at work. “I think I survived by sneaking out to work. I know how old I am and that I am one shoulder injury away from losing roles like Vengeance. So I keep the training, I keep the job. That's the strange thing about pain: you can't prepare for it. You think you're going to cry and get it over with. You make plans, but they never work out,” he told Esquire.
Revenge (2008) had been the film that, a year earlier, had changed his career. Neeson had become an action hero thanks to the hit-or-miss success of that cliché-laden little European production in which a man with “certain skills” took on a human trafficking mob to save his daughter. His character, Bryan Mills, followed in the footsteps of Charles Bronson's foundational Paul Kersey in The City's Justice and delivered swordsmanship as well as lapidary phrases like: “If I let go of my daughter right now, everything will be settled. I will not look for him, nor will I persecute him.
Neeson's presence in that thriller was so anomalous due to his previous trajectory—and due to his age, he was over fifty—that it can only be explained by the fact that he was the one who claimed to star in it. The Irishman had fallen in love with the script and when he came across producer Luc Besson during a festival he approached him directly: "Look, I'm sure I'm not anywhere near your list of actors for this, but I was a boxer, I love doing the scenes fighting and I've done some sword sorcery movies and shit. Please think of me for this,” he told Entertainment Weekly last year.
Obviously, no one considered saying no to a star of his level and the role was his. “I felt like a kid in a toy store doing it, between stunts and the action scenes and the weapons training. I loved." Despite the enthusiasm with which he was involved in the project, he was aware that that unpretentious thriller would end up languishing on the shelves of video stores —in 2008 there were still a few left—, the natural territory of so many by-products of what has been called movies for parents, until it became a small download phenomenon that, after being "rescued" by Fox, ended up number one at the American box office.
“I remember the first weekend it was number 3, the next weekend it was number 2, and the number 1. Then it went down to number 4 and back up to number 3. It had an extraordinary cycle. That's how it started, and then there were plans for a second, and of course a third. It was luck, and you need some luck in this business.” Vengeance raised 226 million dollars and its sequels —the third filmed partially in Murcia—, which exceeded 300, placed him as one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood.
Bryan Mills became an iconic new character from an actor who has a few in his career. Neeson has played all sorts of more or less imperfect heroes, he has been Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, Ra's al Ghul in Nolan's Batman, the Irish leader Michael Collins, Oskar Schindler, Rob Roy, Jean Valjean in The wretched, Zeus himself, the Hannibal who loved that plans go well in The A-Team and even the majestic Aslan of Narnia. There is such archetypal dignity to that long frame that sometimes seems to be hunched over by the weight of the world's injustice that Michael Bay asked the Transformers animators to draw inspiration from him for Optimus Prime's body language.
In fact, the actor took his first steps in the cinema under the armor of a hero. He was the knight Gawain in John Boorman's medieval fantasy Excalibur. Neeson, who had been an altar boy, a boxer, a football player, and a Guinness delivery man as if following the good Irishman's manual, was discovered by Boorman during a theatrical production. And that iconoclastic revision of the Arthurian cycle not only brought him the attention of the industry but also love. During filming he met Helen Mirren who played the witch Morgana. She wasn't his only famous girlfriend. Before meeting Richardson, he had a certain reputation as a womanizer and he is known for more or less long relationships with stars such as Julia Roberts, Brooke Shields, Cher, Barbra Streisand, and Sinéad O'Connor.
Throughout his 40-plus-year career, Neeson has worked with top directors. In addition to Spielberg, he has been placed under the orders of Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Clint Eastwood, and Woody Allen. Precisely about the filming of Husbands and Wives, he tells an anecdote that he recognizes as juicy. Everyone in the profession knows that Allen spends little time on the set, gives the go-to order, records, and leaves. But one day, while they were planning a bed scene between Neeson and Judy Davis, the director was absent from the set for 20 minutes, to the bewilderment of the entire crew and the discomfort of the actors, who stood waiting for directions half-N-. Later they learned that Allen had received a call: it was his lawyer informing him that Mia Farrow had discovered some N- photos of her daughter Son Yi. The rest is history.
The success of Revenge led to a sea change in the career of Neeson, whose latest productions have the common thread of a smoking cannon on the poster and the word "revenge" somewhere between the title and the third line of the synopsis. But there is also another unifying element: loss. The way to deal with it or to avoid it at any cost is present even in A Monster Come to see me by the Spanish Juan Antonio Bayona —another countryman, Jaume Collet Serra has already directed him four times. In it, he plays a huge talking tree that guides the leading child to cope with the terminal illness of his mother. In Vengeance below zero, another of his latest productions, the way to deal with loss is less subtle and more of his trademark: shooting. Neeson is a snowplow driver who pursues the drug dealers who murdered his son, who is played by his own son, Micheál Richardson - he chose his mother's last name as a tribute after his death -. A son who for a brief period of adolescence took refuge in drugs to try to overcome the death of his mother and who, like his brother, has his father as a vital reference.
The two reunited on Made in Italy to tell the story of an estranged father and son who travel to Tuscany to restore and sell a dilapidated villa that had belonged to his deceased wife. Always the loss. Even in films in which —somewhat unusual— he plays a villain, Widows, for example, the death of a loved one, this time a son killed by the police, nestles in the heart of his character.
Off-screen, Neeson hates guns. But despite this, on June 25 he will have one in his hands again in The Ice Road, a premiere for which Netflix has paid 18 million, aware that the presence of the most adored vigilante of the 21st century, with the permission of John Wick, guarantees viewings. In it, Neeson plays a truck driver who must brave an ocean of ice to rescue a group of trapped miners. And according to the synopsis "battling snowmelt and a massive storm, they discover that the real threat is yet to come." We don't know what supernatural or natural enemies Neeson will face, but we do know that they won't be as dangerous as the loneliness that has gripped him for more than a decade and that he has never stopped talking about because talking about his great love is a way to keep it alive. And against that enemy, there is no effective defense, for now.
