| 1952 | Jun 7 | Birth in Ballymena, Northern Ireland | |
| Family | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Father is a care taker of a girls's school and mother a cook. Has 3 sisters: Elizabeth, Bernadette, Rosaleen | |||
|
The boy was called Liam for short, after a revered local priest.
The family lived in a Housing Trust project. "It was a tiny house,"
recalls Helen Mirren, who went for a visit years later. "It was really
minute. You can't believe they could all squeeze into it."
--GQ, Dec 1993
"My father had a gentle, dreamy disposition," says Bernadette,
now a teacher in Worthing, England, outside of Brighton. Barney Neeson's
father had owned a pub "and he saw the indignities of drink. My mother,
too. So we had a temperate household." Neeson says his father's only
indulgence was a weekly poker game with the parish priests. "I'd hear him
come back at four in the mornin', having lost five pounds. My mom would
get upset over that."
--GQ, Dec 1993 Ask him if he's a tough guy and he answers, "My sister Bernadette, she has six kids and teaches creative writing and sings in pubs. She is the
most amazing woman. When we were kids, she was a tomboy. She would fight
my battles for me."
--GQ, March 1998 | |||
| Childhood | |||
| Wanted to be Butcher, Priest, Boxer, Architect. | |||
His finest memories have to do with going to the movies when he was a lad in Ballymena. "It was a small town, with just one cinema, but they had a double bill and they changed it every two days! You could see 14 films a week, which I often did. I was usually the only one in the place, and I'd see a Sergio Leone Western along with Women in Love. It was quite an education for a boy like me. But they eventually started showing porno because that's where the money was. I went occasionally, I must admit, but I was friendly with all the people who worked there, and it got too embarrassing to go in and see Flash of Lust or something like that. So I'd just go home and read." | |||
Neeson had been an enthusiastic heavyweight boxer, as his nose bears witness. "I broke it when I was 15," he said. "It was fixed in the corner by my own trainer." But he knew that boxing was not where his future lay. "I just didn't have the killer instinct." | |||
The son of a school caretaker and a strict Catholic mother, Neeson had no desire to act, but took a part in a school play when he was 16 "because I fancied the girl who would be playing my sister." | |||
"Well, when I was about 17 I had a fight which I won and I remember coming out of the ring and my dad was there and he said, 'Go and get changed,' and I didn't know what he meant. My brain just went and it was very, very scary. It lasted for nearly two minutes and I thought, 'Fuck this, if this is happening at 17' I had aspirations to maybe make an Olympic team, but that really scared me and I didn't tell too many people about it. I just thought, 'This is it, get out of it.'" | |||
| Education | |||
| One year at the Queen's university in Belfast with major in Physics and Computer Science | |||
... but Neeson had been "very much a loner" at university. He soon discovered just how much of a loner. "I was at a physics lecture one Monday morning," he said. "There were very few people there. I thought, 'Oh, the students have been partying. There's been some huge party and everybody has a hangover." "After the lecture I was walking back to the halls of residence. There was no one on the streets. I thought that was weird Ñ there were always flocks of students around. I was walking merrily along with my briefcase and I saw this group of placard-carrying students. They all surrounded me. I was mortified. I felt, 'Why am I being singled out?' The placards said, 'SCAB! STUDENTS - STAY AWAY FROM UNIVERSITY.' Bloody Sunday in Derry had occurred the day before. I remember feeling totally ignorant and selfish. And, having had a cosseted childhood, based on amateur dramatics and amateur boxing, it had a real effect on me. Then I bought some books on the history of my country. | |||
| 1972 | Works as a Fork Lift Truck Driver for Murphy's in Ballymena and does Amateur Plays | ||
There were two of us who were fork lift truck drivers. My partner, senior partner I should say, was like God. He was called Sam Hannah. He's the sort of man John Steinbeck would have loved, and would have written a book about. Stoic, very, very deep, a man of few words but a genius on a fork lift truck. I revered him. And he treated me as if I was a kind of piece of dust. I was there just over a year and one day there was a break in the production line where Guinness and Harp were being bottled. Other men would take the bottles from the line and stick them onto pallets and the fork lift drivers would pick up the pallets and store them at the back of the factory. This particular day there was a lull. I'll never forget it, Sam said to me, 'Don't stay here long, son. Get on with your life.' I was so stunned that he had actually said these pearls of wisdom to me. He didn't look at me. He just said it straight out. And I thought O.K. I'll tell him my innermost desires, which were my aspirations to become an actor. He listened to me, never looked at me, kept drawing on his cigarette. "When I'd finished he took another pull and said, 'You do it, son, you follow your dream because you never know, you might be the next Roy Rogers.' | |||
When Liam Neeson thinks back to his early life, he sometimes shakes his head about how determined he was to pursue acting in the face of the Troubles. "I would hitchhike into Belfast after work on the fork lift and I wouldn't think anything of it. I was part of a group called the Clarence. We did the American play Johnny Belinda and Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I would hitch into Belfast for rehearsals because that's what my life revolved around. I could have been shot, anything could have happened. The innocence," he marveled. | |||
"During the worst of the bombings and sectarian killings," Neeson recalls, "there was always a drama festival going on in some little village hall. It was always supported by the people. I remember playing the Patrician Hall in Carrickmore, County Tyrone, both as an amateur and as a professional with Field Day. It was a big place, and the first time I went, I was surprised that at eight o'clock the hall was almost empty. But then I learned that the play would start at nine. That was so the cows could be milked and the farmers would have a chance to get washed up before coming to the play. Professionally I did Brian Friel's Translations there with Stephen Rea, a Filed Day production. In amateur days, I did Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird Of Youth'. I also played in 'Philadelphia, Here I Come." | |||
| 1975 |  | St. Mary's teaching school, England: Major in Physics and Drama, flunked out (he failed the exam to be promoted into his third year ). Continues in Drama. Now regrets that he didn't finish it. | |
Yet Neeson confesses that even before the exam, he suspected he might not be cut out for the classroom. "I was a dead pushover,"he admits of his efforts to discipline spirited thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls while student teaching. "At that age, they're so clever," he says, "and they'd flirt.'" | |||
But it wasn't until a friend dared him to that he actually took the plunge professionally. After leaving college, Neeson moved back to Belfast and worked-"in charge of Xerox machines and copying"-in an architect's office. He used to brag to coworkers about his plans to become an actor. "One day, someone called my bluff," Neeson recalls. "He said. 'There's a phone. Call up the Lyric Players Theater and ask for an audition.'" | |||
So, on impulse, he called the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast. 'I was lucky - it could have been a secretary telling me to call back the next week, but the owner of the theatre happened to pick up the phone.' Also by coincidence, she had been looking for an actor of his exact size and weight. | |||