. It completely swayed public opinion. “Drive-by shootings, bombs. “Tell them I will come for them. “I’m sure they were considering a bunch of other guys, too.” He says he would have loved to be 007, but Richardson said she wouldn’t marry him if he was.

There were so many celebrities supporting [the ban], I was like, ‘These guys need a celebrity or two.’ ”“He really put himself in the line of fire,” says Stephen Malone, a second-generation carriage driver and spokesman for the horse-and-carriage industry. “Our town was essentially Protestant, but there were a few Catholics on our street. It’s OK! Everything seemed fine at first: “Oh, darling — I’ve taken a tumble in the snow” is what she told Neeson on the phone that night.

He spent two weeks filming motion-capture in a special room with cameras surrounding him on every side. He tries to keep busy lest he wallow. It beats hiding in a basement in eastern Aleppo.”(As Richardson once put it: “I think he probably, on some level — although he wouldn’t say it — wakes up every morning thinking, ‘Isn’t it great I’m not driving a forklift?’ ”)Now that he’s back in New York, Neeson looks forward to lying low for a while. (“Really?” says Neeson. The topic? Foreign countries. So I think that’s kind of therapeutic. And this, I warn Neeson, is when I’m leading toward the death of his wife.Neeson met Richardson when he was a 40-year-old bachelor who’d already dated Julia Roberts, Helen Mirren, and Brooke Shields. “The thrill for me is being on a river with my pouch and rod, and I know there’s a fish over there, or at least I think there is, so I’ll do five or six casts. I’m fucking lucky: A stranger gets in touch with my agent and says, ‘Could you send Liam Neeson a script?’ I’m still flattered by that. At age nine, Neeson began boxing lessons at the All Saints Youth Club, going on to win a number of regional titles before discontinuing at age 17.After leaving university, Neeson returned to Ballymena, where he worked in a variety of casual jobs, from a forklift operator at Guinness to a truck driver.

“It wasn’t.” Anyway, as far as his waning faith goes: “I think it was gradual.”Three years ago, Central Park was the unlikely battleground for one of the most heated fights of Neeson’s public life. “Computer nerds.” The end product looks something like a woodsy Transformer — which, weirdly, makes sense, given that Transformers director Michael Bay has said that Neeson’s regal bearing was his inspiration for Optimus Prime. “ ’There’s the carousel — and that’s Liam Neeson.’ ” Malone adds: “Liam Neeson is the biggest Hollywood star going right now, and he walks through Central Park and stops to talk to carriage guys. “New Zealand, that’s the mecca,” Neeson says.

The film was a huge hit and spawned two sequels as well as a TV series and led Liam Neeson to take the lead in a handful of other action films. Neeson keeps his coat on for our entire time together, either as a sort of armor or in case he decides to make a quick getaway. The stories are designed to divine meaning from a meaningless world — a world where, as the Monster says at one point, “Farmers’ daughters die for no reason.” It’s a movie, in other words, about death, loss, mourning, and the ways we help one another cope.

Two years later they were married in the garden of their farmhouse, and the boys soon followed. They were shooting Nell on a lake and needed something for Neeson to do in his downtime; Freund had just come off “When he said he’d discovered fly-fishing,” says Graham, “my first thought was, ‘My God, that is the perfect hobby for you.’ It’s peaceful.

“You’re trying to outwit a fish that’s been around since the Triassic with a piece of yarn or your own hair, he says. But unbeknownst to the doctors, her brain was slowly bleeding. He can’t fight. The similarity in A Monster Calls is awful and impossible to ignore: a beautiful young mother struck down before her time. “It’s almost like he’s part of the tour,” jokes McKeever. I don’t know him.”)Scorsese says that Neeson was one of the key elements to finally getting Now Neeson doesn’t consider himself much of a Catholic. Hence ‘phantoms.’ But you need a guide, that’s the only trouble.” He’d rather go alone? Empire magazine ranked Neeson among both the "100 Sexiest Stars in Film History" … ‘Mom, you’re 90! It must be gut-wrenching to have to revisit the worst moment of your life again and again, every time an interviewer needs a new quote. . The horse ban was supported by famous animal advocates like Miley Cyrus and Alec Baldwin. “I was being considered,” Neeson says. But I don’t spar. And Daniel, 20, is a sophomore theater and digital-media production major. Neeson was born William John but called Liam (short for William) after the local priest.