How much is Liam Neeson worth?
| Net Worth: | $150 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional Actor |
| Date of Birth: | June 7, 1952 |
| Country: | Ireland, United Kingdom |
| Height: | 1.93 m |
About Liam Neeson
Leave nepotism out. Every Miley Cyrus or Drew Barrymore needs a Liam Neeson, whose journey to fame hasn’t exactly been smooth. Neeson stunned everyone when he emerged from relative obscurity to star in the amazing Schindler’s List with the gravitas, dignity, pathos, and depth of an actor who had been practicing his art for decades. Since it turned out that he had.
He is one of Hollywood’s living legends, having appeared in movies including Taken, Gangs of New York, and Schindler’s List. As a boy, Neeson enjoyed boxing and credited the sport as giving him the determination in later years to pick himself up and keep going whenever he was rejected for an acting job.
A school play at the age of 11 opened up the world of acting to young Liam. It was his role as a young man trying to connect with his father in the play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! that decided Neeson’s fate: “Something clicked. I thought, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I felt a release of emotion.”
Acting, however, wasn’t a suitable career choice for someone from Neeson’s background, so he enrolled in physics and computer science at Queen’s University in Belfast. Neeson was frustrated, though. He hated his classes and ended up leaving university to work. He tried his hand at a few things: forklift driver at a Guinness brewery, a teacher-training college in Newcastle and a job as an architect’s assistant, but acting was still in Neeson’s blood.
Superb acting
Despite coming from a Catholic household in a largely Protestant neighborhood, Neeson rarely faced discrimination on account of his religion. Nevertheless, sneaking into the Protestant church to watch preacher Ian Paisley storm out of the pulpit was one of the things that initially inspired him to take action.
“He had a magnificent presence,” Neeson said later, “it was acting, but it was also great acting.”
His other hobbies were movies, girlfriends, and boxing (at age 16, he would win the Heavyweight Youth Champion). He was a towering 6’4″, which was ideal for boxing and courting women, but he chose to lean softer and participate in multiple school plays since he had a crush on one of the leads.
At age 17, he gave up boxing and joined the Slemish Players, a group of committed but untrained amateur actors who played in community centers all around Ireland. The girls came and went, but acting stuck.
He only spent a year at the University of Belfast, where he briefly attended college. He accepted a day job at the Guinness Brewery driving a forklift while working as an actor at night.
He was so committed that he hitchhiked to Belfast three times a week to practice for a play during the worst of the Troubles (the Northern Ireland bombings and killings in the early 1970s). Later, he would express surprise at how little the threat had deterred him. He might have been shot in those times in that city.
Liam had a passion for performing but was unclear if it would make a good career. After an unsuccessful effort at becoming a teacher, he finally decided to devote himself to acting. He was active in Irish theater before being discovered by director John Boorman, who liked him and hired him for Excalibur, his debut big-budget movie. The movie was a hit, and Neeson did well in it, but his largest gain came from a new relationship with Helen Mirren, his co-star in Excalibur and a renowned stage actress.
Despite his talent, Neeson had a certain gentleness about him, and Mirren served as his window to the outside world. They dated for five years, during which time Mirren introduced him to small joys like parties and Chinese food, as well as supporting and introducing him to movies like Krull, The Bounty, and The Mission. Neeson was prepared once the two had split. In January 1986, he packed his belongings and headed for Los Angeles with enough cash to last six weeks.
“I wanted to get leads in movies,” he says, “and I wasn’t going to do that in London.”
Listed by Spielberg
His American acting career began with a cameo on an episode of Miami Vice and quickly exploded with gigs. With over a dozen films over the following six years, he was starting to build a reputation for himself as a skilled character actor. Natasha Richardson pursued him for an Anna Christie theatrical production, first for a role and then as a partner. Soon after Richardson’s divorce from producer Robert Fox, the two would start dating and eventually get married in 1994.
Over the next two years, they would give birth to two sons.
His portrayal of Anna Christie would get him the job of a lifetime in addition to a Tony Award nomination and a new bride.
He had given a Schindler’s List audition, but the director didn’t choose him for the part until after he saw Neeson on Broadway. This allowed him to showcase the impressive skills he had developed over many years of work by having him in the best movie of the year. Going up against an AIDS-stricken Tom Hanks in Philadelphia is almost unfair, but it didn’t matter; at 41, he had established himself as a leading man in Hollywood.
Lows And Highs
He didn’t let the chance pass him by. He appeared in the moving biopics Michael Collins and Rob Roy, displayed his nuance in Les Misérables, and delighted in his first super-blockbuster, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. His career has taken off since Star Wars as he showcased his incredible range. In Batman Begins, Gangs of New York, and Taken, he was coolly aggressive (to great effect), while in Kinsey and Breakfast on Pluto, he was marvelously tragic. His portrayal of Aslan the Lion in The Chronicles of Narnia made even his voice renowned.
Neeson met Natasha Richardson, an actress, in 1984 while they were both working on the TV miniseries Ellis Island. On July 3, 1994, they got married and moved to Millbrook, New York. Michael, born in 1995, and Daniel, born in 1996, are the couple’s two kids. When his wife Natasha died in a terrible skiing accident in Canada in March 2009, his career had never been better.
Neeson was abruptly left to raise their two boys by himself. He withdrew from the spotlight to console his family, but he soon returned prepared to work. He had seven theatrical releases in 2010, making it the busiest year of his career. The consummate professional is at the top of his game and shows no signs of slowing down. He is possibly Ireland’s finest screen actor.
In her 1999 New Year’s Honours List, Queen Elizabeth II added Liam Neeson to the Order of the British Empire.
Neeson has been nominated for more than a dozen acting awards and has won a few of them. Most notable is his Oscar nomination for Schindler’s List as Best Actor in a Leading Role. Additionally, the actor has received two Tony Award nominations for Best Actor in a Play: for Anna Christie in 1993 and for The Crucible in 2002.
Neeson informed Diane Sawyer, a viewer of ABC’s Good Morning America, that he had recently naturalized as a citizen of the United States in August 2009.
“[I’ve] never had fantasies of playing James Bond. But it’s good to fire guns and and drive cars really fast, go after bad guys, ya know?”
