Of the seven decades that he has lived, Neeson has maintained a relationship with acting for almost sixty years
According to Magazine, at the age of eleven, he participated in a school play to impress a girl. At that time, Neeson attended 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, also a school janitor, and they had four children.
“How would I describe my childhood? Normal I would say. Raised in a working-class Irish Catholic upbringing, ”said the actor in a Unicef video, 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 little farm in the summer.
Apart 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 started 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 led 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 Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at half past seven' 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 started competing and about six years later he took part in his last fight. Finally, he gave up boxing because it required more and more time that he could not dedicate between studies and amateur acting. "And I thought, 'If I can't spend time with it, 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 direct left."
Later, he entered Queen's University Belfast to study Physics and Computing but dropped out within a year. In 1976 he joined the Lyric Players Theater in Belfast and two years later joined the Abbey Theater in Dublin. In 1978 he made his film debut with "Pilgrim's Progress".
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" in 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, also an actress Natasha Richardson, whom he had married in 1994, after a fall during a ski lesson.
“I think I survived by running away a bit. Running away to work,” he told Esquire in 2011. “It's quite easy to plan jobs, plan a lot of work. It is effective. But that's the strange thing about mourning, 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.
In 2019, the actor sowed controversy by recalling 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 a racist and later apologized for his comments.
