He was a man formed of charismatic muscle and countless contradictions. But the romantic profile cut by Irish rebel Michael Collins was not what gripped Liam Neeson so much as one enigmatic habit. "Here he was at one point the most hunted man in Europe," Neeson recounts, his subdued brogue suddenly acquiring crowded-pub volume, "and he stayed out in the open! The British looked for him in the shadows, and there he was wearing steel taps on his shoes, his walk a fierce click--always right there, always in your face."
Bold presence that goes unnoticed--now there is something Liam Neeson knows a bit about. With a 6-ft. 4-in. frame and a face that is memorably poetic in its asymmetry, Neeson, 44, has always possessed movie-star aura. But it took Hollywood nearly a decade to figure out how to capture it. By the time Neeson landed the role of Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg's monumental Holocaust elegy, the Irish actor had already appeared in 23 mostly unheralded films. And yet, even though Schindler's List won Neeson the kind of praise and splashy recognition (including an Oscar nomination for Best Actor) that had long eluded him, it was a film that belonged more to its harrowing subject matter and its celebrated director's vision than to its star.
With Michael Collins, the elegantly brawny actor finally has a made-to-fit 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 throws her the kind of gently flirtatious smile that convinces us of Collins' charismatic energy in but an instant.
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 guy."
As was 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 man.'"