Liam Neeson - the Unlikely Irish Box Office Champion

It’s strange to think today that the man from Ballymena in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, is now a most unlikely king of the box office.

If you look back at his last few movies – The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (grossed at least $290 million), Batman Begins ($205 million) and Star Wars - Episode I: Phantom Menace ($430 million) – that’s a total of nearly one billion dollars worth of tickets. Granted he wasn’t the leading man in those movies, but that’s mightily impressive in an industry that judges you on your last box office figures.

He will next be seen as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s next movie - reuniting them again more than ten years after Schindler’s List - and he will also again provide the voice of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Not bad for someone who was Youth Heavyweight Champion of Ireland for three consecutive years, but originally wanted to be a butcher.

William John Neeson was born on 7th June, 1952, the third child and only boy among four siblings in a working-class Catholic family:

“There was never a lot of money floating around. But there was always food on the table.”

Ballymena was a predominantly Unionist town, but “the troubles” didn’t seem to affect Neeson greatly, as most of his friends were Protestants:

“I think I realized there were two communities in Northern Ireland when I was about nine or 10, not because there was any trouble but because in certain years my parents would keep us indoors on the 12th of July. I couldn’t figure that out, because all my mates were out dancing in the streets and I wanted to go out and join them. So it was then that I sensed a “them and us” attitude.”

However, on being offered Freedom of the Town of Ballymena by the Borough Council in 2000 he commented he had felt like a “second-class citizen” in the town, and the offer was withdrawn.