Liam Neeson, the third-age avenger | Culture

In 2007, Liam Neeson (Ballymena, Northern Ireland, 72 years old) received a curious proposal, an action script co-written by Luc Besson that Jeff Bridges had rejected, and that after a first reading sounded like something for “direct to DVD”. However, the project involved learning karate and moving to Paris for four months, and Neeson was interested in both. The following year, Revenge The fact that the film became a worldwide hit and that, after the death of his wife in 2009, Neeson abandoned dramatic characters to focus on adrenaline-fuelled roles are two twists of fate that no one could have predicted. But it happened, and at this stage of his career, the Northern Irishman has become the talisman of films based on the premise of “you don’t know who you’re messing with”, like his latest release in Spain, In the land of saints and sinners. Since that fateful 2009, the actor has been filming one film after another (up to 44): he is the king of action hero of the third age. Or, as the gossips call it, the leader of the parents’ cinema.I think the public likes to see people who look real doing action, who suffer and get tired,” the actor told EL PAÍS during the promotion of A night to die.

Neeson’s career can be divided into Picasso-style stages. And with the death of Natasha Richardson in a skiing accident, the current one began, in which he got off the plane Lincoln, by Steven Spielberg. The actor was set to star in the biopic, He had been working on the project for four years… Until, after finishing the script reading months after the family tragedy, he told Spielberg that he had no energy. Finally, Daniel Day-Lewis replaced him. “I survived by running away from work. I know how old I am and that I am one shoulder injury away from losing roles like that of Revenge. So I stick with the training, I stick with the work. That’s the strange thing about pain: you can’t prepare for it,” counted on Esquire.

That’s why he threw himself into the maelstrom of very physical films and felt more comfortable in Clash of the Titans, The A-Team, the new installment of The Chronicles of Narnia, and in thrillers that made him a brand: Identityless, White Hell, Revenge: Istanbul Connection, Revenge Below Zero (not part of the saga, but in Spain the title was changed as a commercial trick), The Protector, The Mediator, Walking Among the Tombs, One Night to Survive… The genre “Neeson throws out shots and blows” includes two subgenres: “You messed with my family” and “You don’t know who you’re messing with.” In the land of saints and sinners belongs to the second branch.

It’s 1974 and Finbar Murphy lives in a secluded, almost idyllic Irish village. When asked what he actually does for a living, he replies curtly: “You don’t want to know.” In lands of saints and sinners It’s a western set in the 20th century, because if Murphy (Liam Neeson, who else) is the local bad guy (who, as they said in the promotion, “wants to do good through evil”), who protects his people disguised as a good guy, the arrival of a handful of villains, in this case a particularly cruel IRA commando led by a woman eager for revenge, breaks up the coexistence and will make each character choose their side in the story. For example, the local policeman, Murphy’s best friend, who lives in ignorance without suspecting the protagonist’s murderous coldness, and who is embodied by one of Neeson’s old friends in real life, Ciarán Hinds.

Neeson has been making a living from acting for nearly half a century. The Irishman started out in theatre and boxing (hence the broken nose), and did better in the former. On stage, in a production of Of Mice and Men, In 1980, he was discovered by director John Boorman, and recruited for Excalibur: Neeson entered the big screen in the cinema. Along the way, he began a romantic relationship with Helen Mirren, who was already a star, and who later thanked her for polishing the twenty-something Irishman in a Pygmalion-style way. Between 1982 and 1986, entering his second professional stage, he worked relentlessly, with the aim of succeeding in Hollywood, and thus he reached The mission or the fifth installment of the saga of detective Harry Callahan: The blacklist. He managed to lead distributions of thrillers as The silence of suspicion either Ruby Cairo and work with prestigious directors such as Woody Allen in Husbands and wives or Sam Raimi in Darkman.

But he didn’t forget about the theatre. And here begins another new stage. In 1993, Neeson made his Broadway debut as Mat Burke in Anna Christie, by Eugene O’Neill, which also included Natasha Richardson. It was from that work that she got the nickname “sexual sequoia” from the critic The New Yorker; his marriage to Richardson; her first Tony Award nomination and her starring role in Schindler’s List. Steven Spielberg was in a sea of ​​doubt about which actor would play Oskar Schindler: Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner or Mel Gibson, who had offered himself? One day he went to see Anna Christie, and at the end of the performance he went to Neeson’s dressing room to chat with the actor: there was his Oskar. Two years ago, in an interview at the San Sebastian festival, the actor told Neeson that he was going to be a part of the film. Icon: “At first I thought we were making a small film. Then the film came out and took on a life of its own. And then there was an effect, like I was entering another division where I was offered more leading roles, which was fantastic.”

During this period, Neeson starred in major productions, almost all of them period films, such as Michael Collins, Rob Roy either The Miserables. At the age of 45 he began to embody mentors or teachers of the protagonists in Batman, Star Wars, Kingdom of Heaven either Gangs of New York. And, premonitory, he played a widower worried about the emotional stability of his stepson in Love Actually (2003).

Until the success of Revenge and on March 16, 2009, the night Richardson called him from the resort Mont Tremblant ski resort near Montreal: she had fallen in the middle of a beginners’ ski lesson, but without any serious consequences. She did have a headache, though. It was their last conversation. The next day she fell into a coma, and when Neeson arrived at the hospital from a shoot in Toronto, he found her brain dead. He decided to take his wife to New York, so that her family and friends could say goodbye to her, and she died there, after being disconnected from the machine that kept her body running, on March 18.

Throughout the films since Richardson’s disappearance, Neeson’s talent has appeared on specific occasions, such as the tree he brought to life in A monster comes to see me, by Juan Antonio Bayona, his self-parody in the series Atlanta or in some sequences of A villa in Tuscany, a disastrous but healing drama in which the actor and his eldest son, Micheál Richardson, played a father and son with a distant relationship after losing the mother of the family in a car accident, who must renovate the house in Italy that they have inherited.

Now Neeson has taken another professional turn, and is filming Law of Toughness, he reboot from the comic saga Grab it as you can, in which he plays Frank Drebin Jr., the son of the clumsy policeman who was masterfully executed by Leslie Nielsen. Icon He summed up this journey: “I like the craft of acting. I like to watch a sequence of mine and think: ‘That came out well, that worked.’ I’ve had a good life.”

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