Word: neeson
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...picture he can rightfully think of as his own. "It is one of those movies where the entire film is defined by the central performance," concedes Collins director Neil Jordan. "And Liam carries the film through like a train. He never stops." To be sure, Collins provides Neeson with a lot of big scenes in which to holler and pound tables and make like a potential Academy Award winner, but the quieter moments are his most impressive ones. For example, in a scene in which Collins meets with a housemaid who has agreed to do some spying for him, Neeson...
Even though it took him 13 years to bring Michael Collins to the screen, Jordan never had anyone but Neeson in mind for the role of the Irish revolutionary and guerrilla tactician. "Liam has got this terribly honest heart beneath everything," Jordan notes. "One of my worries was that the audience would perhaps lose sympathy for Collins because what he does is so ferocious, but halfway through I realized Liam could chop up his grandmother and he'd still be a sympathetic...
...evident in his portrayal of Schindler, who saved 1,200 Jews from the horrors of Auschwitz but also had a cozy relationship with the Nazis, Neeson has a gift for depicting heroic men whose moral code is something short of Benedictine. "No one wants to see the flat good guy or bad guy that's just popcorn for the eyes," Neeson argues. "I'd hate for an audience every time they see me to think, 'Aw, the day is goin' to be saved--he's such a nice...
Nice, no. Soulfully conflicted, surely. Neeson grew up Catholic in a small, rural hamlet in Northern Ireland. As a teenager he was torn between a passion for boxing and a love of theater. The world of Chekhov won out in the early '70s, when Neeson joined Belfast's repertory Lyric Players and then graduated to the renowned Abbey Theater in Dublin. There he first tackled drama that dealt with his country's fractious history--in his words, "a lot of Sean O'Casey." (The apolitical Neeson, however, still knew almost nothing about Collins when he came to the role...
After working in numerous British feature and TV films, Neeson moved in 1985 to Los Angeles, where he began performing in a string of indifferently received movies like The Good Mother, with Diane Keaton, and Sam Raimi's Darkman. But he never forgot the stage, and it was his dynamic performance in a '93 Broadway revival of Anna Christie that convinced Spielberg he had found his Schindler...