'I speak to her every day': How Liam Neeson keeps wife Natasha Richardson's memory alive 15 years on
By Merryn Porter |
Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson's love story was straight out of a movie script.
After falling in love on stage, nothing, including the fact Richardson had a husband at the time, was going to keep them apart.
This week marked 15 years since her shocking death following a skiing accident.
Here, we look back at the couple's relationship, from their first meeting to her untimely death at 45.
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Irish actor Neeson, then 40, and ?British-born Richardson, then 29, met when they were cast in the Broadway play Anna Christie.
It was the British actress' Broadway debut, and their performances earned them both Tony nominations.
Their chemistry was also obvious.
"What can I say? Obviously I fell very much in love with him"
In a 2014 interview with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, Neeson recalled, "I'd never had that kind of an explosive chemistry situation with an actor, or actress."
"We had just this wonderful kind of dance ... on stage every night. She and I were like [Fred] Astaire and [Ginger] Rogers."
In the same interview he recalled her "radiant beauty" and "cascading hair" and admitted he found her ?"very, very attractive."
By the time the 54-show season ended, Richardson's union with English theatre and film producer Robert Fox, whom she married in 1990, was over.?
Richardson told the Daily News in 2009 that falling in love with Neeson was "bad timing" but could not be helped.
"Working with him, what happened between us, and that becoming public knowledge in conjunction with my marriage falling apart, was kind of bad timing," she said.
"So what can I say? Obviously I fell very much in love with him."
??By the time Richardson turned 30 the following May, Neeson was on location in Poland filming Schindler's List, in which he played Oskar Schindler.
He sent Richardson a birthday card, which reportedly said, "You're catching up with me. Lots of love, Oskar."
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Richardson was reportedly not happy, and told him so. "This is like a letter from a buddy. What is our relationship?" she asked.
Neeson said it was this reaction that made him realise he was in love.
"That was when I knew I really loved this person," he said. "I thought, 'This is real and genuine and is something that has to be protected'."
After he returned, the pair bought a home near the village of Millbrook in upstate New York.?
By 1994 the pair were reportedly engaged. Neeson had accepted a role in the film Nell, opposite Jodie Foster.
He had been a ladies' man in the past, something that didn't worry Richardson, who once said she was "pleased that women fall in love with him, because I know why."
But according to an article in Country Living, she was now less keen on them being separated.
"It was difficult to kind of go, 'Bye, honey! Have fun with the other girls'," she said. "I thought I would do anything to play this part [of Paula Olsen in Nell]."
Her wish came true and she was cast in the movie, which was filmed from April to June that year.
Around this time, Neeson was touted for the role of a lifetime จC James Bond จC but he later recalled Richardson was not on board.
During a 2021 appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden he said producer Barbara Broccoli called to gauge Neeson's interest in the role, but Richardson nipped the idea in the bud.
"We were doing a movie together in South Carolina, and she says, 'Darling, if you're offered James Bond, and you're going to play it, you're not going to marry me'," he said.
He told Rolling Stone two years later, "She gave me a James Bond ultimatum and she meant it!" adding he understood her reasoning.
"Come on, there's all those gorgeous girls in various countries getting into bed and getting out of bed. I'm sure a lot of her decision-making was based on that!"??
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He revealed that whenever they had an argument, "I would go up to her and [sing the theme song]."
Once filming on Nell wrapped in June, the pair returned home and the following month, they wed at their home.
Neeson later recounted in an episode of SiriusXM's My Favourite Song with John Benjamin Hickey that Richardson surprised her groom by singing Van Morrison's Crazy Love.
"Darling, if you're offered James Bond, and you're going to play it, you're not going to marry me"?
"Behind my back, Natasha had been taking singing lessons to sing it to me," Neeson said. "After the ceremony, we were all going in to start the night's festivities, and she grabbed the microphone, and she sang me this. I was like, 'Wow'."
Eleven months after they wed, the couple welcomed their first child, son Micheจขl, followed by Daniel the following year.
They settled into domestic bliss, with Richardson taking a break from work before starring as Elizabeth James in the 1998 film The Parent Trap. It remains one of her best-known roles.
Over the next decade, she would pick and choose her roles to give her more time for her family, starring in just 10 films and a number of Broadway plays to stay close to home.
The couple was regularly photographed looking loved-up at events together.
In March 2009, Richardson was on a trip to Mont Tremblant ski resort in Canada with her sons, then 13 and 12, when she fell while skiing on a beginner slope.
She was not wearing a helmet and hit her head, but refused medical attention and went back to her room.
Neeson later recalled speaking to her afterwards.
"I spoke to her and she said, 'Oh, darling, I've taken a tumble in the snow'. That's how she described it," he said during the 60 Minutes interview.
Reports say she complained of a severe headache about an hour later and was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital before being transferred to a larger hospital in Montreal, where her condition rapidly deteriorated.
She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, an epidural hematoma, where blood accumulates between the skull and the membrane covering the brain.?
Neeson was on a film set in Toronto, Canada, when he got the call. He reportedly arrived at the hospital only to be told she was on life support and brain dead.
"I went in to her and told her I loved her. I said, 'Sweetie, you're not coming back from this. You've banged your head ... I don't know if you can hear me, but this is what's gone down. And we're bringing you back to New York, all your family and friends will come.' And that was more or less it."
Richardson was flown to a New York hospital where she died ?on March 18.
?She was buried near the couple's home after a funeral attended by family and a host of celebrities.
Two years after her death, Neeson told Esquire grief was something "you can't prepare for."
"You think you're gonna cry and get it over with. You make those plans, but they never work," he said.
"It hits you in the middle of the night กช well, it hits me in the middle of the night. I'm out walking. I'm feeling quite content. And it's like suddenly, boom. It's like you've just done that in your chest."
During the 60 Minutes interview he said he still expected her to walk in the door.
"There's periods now in our New York residence when I hear the door opening. Especially the first couple of years, she would always drop the keys ... on the table, say, 'Hello?'" he said.
"So anytime I hear that door opening, I still think I'm gonna hear her. And, then, [the grief] hits you. It's like a wave. You just get this profound feeling of instability. You feel like a three-legged table.
"Just suddenly you just จC the Earth isn't stable anymore. And then it passes and becomes more infrequent, but I still get it sometimes."
In the same interview, he described Richardson as someone who "cared for everybody."
"She has a motherly instinct. And she'd make dinners for everyone and just looked after us all," Neeson said, adding while he "would always see the glass half empty", she would "see it half full."
At a 2017 reunion of the cast of Love, Actually, Neeson reflected on the fact he played a widower in the 2003 film, only to lose his wife six years later.
"Plenty of times I've thought about this film and my own life. Love Actually, that's the way it is. That's the tapestry of life," he said.
In 2020, Neeson told Inquirer.net he speaks to Richardson every day.
"I speak to her every day at her grave, which is about a mile and a half down the road. I go down there quite often, so I do speak to her as if she's here. Not that she answers me."
