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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.
At a time when some of cinema's most respected actors--Robert De Niro, Al Pacino--have developed an unfortunate taste for self-parody, Neeson has made his mark in Hollywood as a paragon of restrained intensity. In Ethan Frome, the 1993 movie version of Edith Wharton's novel, Neeson manages to convey a lifetime of thwarted longing in one gaze. In a Schindler scene that has Neeson's debonair businessman surveying the destruction of the Cracow ghetto, we see in the actor's perplexed expression something quite remarkable: a man's humanity slowly surfacing.
Although clearly proud of his work in Michael Collins, Neeson appears to be weighed down by the career expectations--his own as well as others'--that have enveloped him since Schindler's List. "Eighty-five percent of the movies I see depress me," he confesses. "I get to page 25 of a script, and I think, I don't know why the hell they want me for this. I call it the blessing and the curse of Schindler's List--the blessing of having done it and the curse of having to compare everything I see to that standard of writing." Indeed, it seems that Neeson hasn't quite let go of Schindler's List, the making of which must have been a deeply emotional experience. Ever since the film's release, the actor has immersed himself almost obsessively in the history of the Holocaust. He keeps a hoard of related memoirs by his bedside but continues to comb bookshops for that "survivor's story I may have not read." He claims he needed to make Nell, the 1994 film in which he co-starred with Jodie Foster, "as a break from the deadlock of reading these stories."
But as he sits in his homey Manhattan office, its walls enlivened by posters of his movies, the clouds quickly pass. The major films of his career seem to herald happily dramatic life changes for him. Following Schindler's List, Neeson, a fabled ladies' man, married actress Natasha Richardson. They have since had two children: Michael, 2, and Daniel, born last August, only a week before Neeson won the Best Actor award for Michael Collins at the Venice Film Festival.