Liam Neeson and Helen Mirren were one of the great couples in show business. They met in the '80s when he was not yet the action hero he later became and she was already an established star. Although a lot of time has passed since that story, both keep the best memories of those years when they lived under the same roof.
In a recent interview, the protagonist of Relentless Search recalled his love story with the legendary actress, whom he defined as “a remarkable woman” and “an extraordinary actress.” “I should be so lucky and honored to have spent three or four years with that lady. She is really something else,” the actor said on ET Canada about his years of love with Mirren.
The actors met on the set of the film Excalibur in 1980 and, apparently, the crush was instantaneous. “I remember being on set and standing with Ciarán Hinds as Helen walked towards us dressed in the full Morgana Le Fey costume and we both said, ‘Oh’ and I fell in love with her. I think Ciaran was too, but I was very in love,” the interpreter revealed before the stunned look of his ex in 2018 when they both shared the studio of The Graham Norton Show.
“I never knew, you've never told me. “It's incredible,” she reacted, surprised. When the host asked her what it was like dating Neeson, Mirren was blunt: “We didn't date, we lived together for four years, we were a serious couple for a while. "Lucky me!" Helen clarified while he told how he discovered that she was also interested in him: "Before meeting her and working together, I had read somewhere that if she liked a boy, she would imitate his way of walking behind his back." . I turned around one day and she was doing that to me,” she said, laughing.
However, he is not the only one who fondly remembers his ex. Last November, the Oscar winner also made reference to the years she shared with the tough man of cinema and explained the reasons why that relationship did not work: “We were not meant to be together that way, but we loved each other very much, a lot,” he confessed on the cover of AARP The Magazine.
She immediately made a hitherto unpublished confession. “All my boyfriends had to have a shirt made by me. I made one for Liam, strange as it may seem,” she said while she warned that, despite the passage of time, her affection for her colleague remains intact. “I love him deeply to this day. He is an incredible guy,” she added with some nostalgia, who after the breakup began dating director Taylor Hackford, whom she met during her audition for White Nights and whom she ended up marrying in 1997.
For her part, Liam Neeson also passed through the altar although he did so three years before her. The lucky one was Natasha Richardson, the eldest daughter of legendary actress Vanessa Redgrave whom she met in 1993 in the play Anna Christie on Broadway. With her, he had two sons, Micheál and Daniel, and formed the family he longed for. However, in 2009, tragedy knocked on his door when his wife suffered a skiing accident in Canada and she died from trauma at the age of 45. Since then, the actor has thrown himself into his career to keep busy.
“I'm not doing well without work. I just don't gloat too much. Know? And I just didn't want, especially for my children, to wallow in sadness or depression," he confessed to Anderson Cooper in 2014, who also took refuge in alcohol for years to grieve. “I stopped drinking because I realized it was too much. Never at work but it was easy at night to drink two or three bottles of Pinot and believe that everything was under control,” he acknowledged.
Although during these years he was associated with other women, Neeson assures that he is not interested in falling in love again. “I'm not on the hunt, I prefer to keep to myself,” the person who visits his wife's grave twice a week warned on more than one occasion.
