Word: neeson
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Casting was a series of sensitive political negotiations. Nichols considered Mel Gibson and Liam Neeson for Stanton, but his first choice was a fellow Clinton sympathizer, Tom Hanks. "He was eager," the director recalls. "Then he said the more he looked at certain things in the script, the less he could see himself doing the film. It was the philandering, I think. He's an at-home, family guy." (Carly Simon, another friend of Bill's, also withdrew as provider of the film's music.) Thornton, an Arkansas homeboy, took the Jemmons role only after receiving Clinton's dispensation...
...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...
...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...
...presented as revolutionary warriors generally are by their admirers: as a practical soldier, a man of rough humor, mostly inarticulate idealism and, perhaps, a certain unspoken regret about that "talent for mayhem" (as he puts it), which is as much burden as gift. And he is embodied by Liam Neeson, who is near perfect in the role. There is an old-fashioned romanticism to the actor, a mysterious darkness beneath the dashing surface of this performance. Something behind Neeson's eyes hints at an authentic sadness about the center's failure to hold, real rue about the violence with which...