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These days, after a cavalcade of interchangeable movies with titles like Absolution, Retribution, Honest Thief, and Blacklight, it often seems like Liam Neeson only makes films for the money. However, this wasn’t always the case, and in the early 1990s, the Ballymena-born screen icon was a hot property in the highest echelons of Hollywood. After breaking through with Darkman in 1990, he achieved the ultimate acknowledgement of success with a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar nomination in 1994.
However, even then, the actor admitted to taking a prominent role primarily for the money, although the motivation behind this choice was very different from what it would be today.
In 1994, when Neeson was interviewed by The New York Times about how much his career had changed after earning that Academy Award nomination for Steven Spielberg’s epic wartime drama Schindler’s List, he revealed that he was struggling with fame for the first time. Playing the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than a thousand Polish Jews from the Holocaust, made Neeson an unlikely sex symbol, and suddenly his private life was all the press wanted to talk about.
“After Schindler, I really started to believe the American Indians who say that when your photograph is taken, you lose part of your soul too,” confessed a shaken Neeson.
However, according to Jodie Foster – Neeson’s co-star in his Schindler’s List follow-up Nell – the star’s rugged leading man good looks and a demeanour that hints at hidden depths would always make him fascinating to filmgoers and the media. “Liam seems like a very gentle man,” Foster mused. “But there are little flashes of danger. He could put his fist in the world.”
With this description, Foster proved to be way ahead of the game by inadvertently naming the exact qualities that would make Neeson such an excellent action star in his later life. However, the movie they made together in 1994 couldn’t have been further away from these future tough-guy roles. In Nell, Neeson played a sensitive doctor who introduces Foster’s titular character – a woman raised in a secluded cabin in the North Carolina mountains – to modern civilisation. In the process, he falls in love with Nell’s psychologist, played by Neeson’s late wife, Natasha Richardson.
When asked what attracted him to the project, though, Neeson was honest that circumstances lined up fortuitously for him at that point in his life and career. You see, in a revelation that mirrors some of the discourse surrounding this year’s Oscars, despite being nominated for the most prestigious acting award in Hollywood for Schindler’s List, Neeson didn’t actually make much money on the film. Most of his profit was donated to Jewish charities and other groups, and when he didn’t work for a long time after shooting the film, he began to look nervously at his bank account.
In addition, Neeson and Richardson spent much of the early part of 1994 buying a property in Millbrook, New York, and they also intended to get married that summer. So, when the offer for Nell came in, Neeson saw a chance to kill two birds with one stone.
“I hadn’t worked in a year,” Neeson reiterated. “We were buying a property. There was this other part, for Natasha, the third lead.” Seizing the opportunity, Neeson floated the idea to director Michael Apted that he and Richardson could be a package deal – and the rest was history.
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