Survival of the fittest - Liam Neeson interview

He fought his corner as a boxer and battled for his life after a near death crash, but Liam Neeson still has plenty of fighting spirit left for his new film, he tells Siobhan Synnot

EVER since he was a boy, Liam Neeson tried to see both sides. "That's why I could never be a really good fighter," he says. "I don't have that killer instinct. That's just the way I am, you know?" Ignoring, for now, those teenage years as a Northern Ireland boxing champion, it's true that the 56-year-old actor has played far more lovers than fighters on screen. Almost 20 years ago he may have caused a small sensation by playing bare-knuckle fighter Danny Scoular in a screen adaptation of William McIlvanney's The Big Man, but since then, filmmakers have preferred to rely on Neeson's warrior looks rather than his pugilist skills.

His is one of the great modern cinematic faces, all crag and tooth, and one that is even more startling in real life; raw-boned and clear skinned, a collision of toughness and vulnerability. He clearly has physical power but the soft eyes and accent suffuse his heroes, and even the rare villains like Batman Begins' Henri Ducard, with an intriguing ambiguity. "If it's a romantic scene, I'll always ask them to shoot me from the side because I'm stronger on that side," he admits. "And my nose is broken on the right. It's not an ego thing, it's just something I've learned about my face, watching it 20-foot high on the screen."

"Liam seems like a very gentle man," says Jodie Foster, who played opposite Neeson in Nell. "But there are little flashes of danger. He could put his fist in the world." And he makes good on that threat in his new film Taken, playing a former security agent who turns Paris upside down in his search for his abducted daughter. Part Jason Bourne, part Terminator, he's the engine in a propulsive, bone-crunching action thriller. With a different leading man this could have been as unengaging as a Steven Seagal concert, but Neeson's terse way with a fist, a gun or a home-brewed electrocution kit elevates Taken into a fabulously guilty pleasure.

''It's a very simple thriller, but I just love the physicality of it," he says. He spent weeks learning the complex martial art of parkour before and during filming. "I had to get together with a couple of guys in Paris and learn these different fight techniques that required actual contact with the opponent. Every time I saw my wife she thought I'd been beaten up, and of course I had. But Pierre, the stunt co-ordinator, wanted me to do as much of the action myself as I could. He didn't make me jump in front of a bus or off a bridge – but I think he thought about it.

"At the time I shot it, I was 54, and I thought, 'I'm not going to be asked to do this sort of stuff in the next few years, so I may as well jump at it.'"

Neeson dispatches villain after villain for practically the entire film. Ironically, some years back, he was in the running for 007, every generation's ultimate movie action role; yet when push came to shove, he walked away. "I was considered for it a few years ago," he recalls. "But my wife said, 'You play James Bond and we're not getting married.'"

So he married Natasha Richardson, and all job offers are now weighed for their impact on his time at home in New York with their two sons. Eight years ago, he suffered a potentially fatal motorcycle accident when his Harley Davidson collided with a deer and the pair of them drove into a tree. Neeson suffered multiple injuries, including a broken pelvis, and at one point it was feared he would never walk again. "I have got a bunch of hardware in my body that makes me look like Boris Karloff under x-ray," he says wryly. "I got cards and flowers from people I never met in my life. They weren't asking for anything. They just said, 'You can do it'. One lady sent me a prayer to St Francis – for the deer! There was no mention of me."

Born in Ballymena in Northern Ireland, Neeson was the only boy among four children in a working-class Catholic family. As a youngster, he took up boxing, and showed promise until he broke his nose in the ring at 15. "I lost the fight. I actually thought I won, but when I came out of the ring I didn't know who I was or where I was. I hadn't been knocked out, I was functioning. My father came over to me and said, 'Go to the dressing room and get changed,' and I didn't know what that meant. I must have looked catatonic. Everything gradually came back as I negotiated those stairs, holding on to the banister. It lasted maybe three minutes, but I got really scared. It's not as if I'd taken a hammering, but I thought, Well, that's f***ing it."

To satisfy his parents, he enrolled at Queen's College in Belfast and was on track to becoming a teacher until drama diverted him. In 1976, he joined the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast. Two years later he moved to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where he appeared in Brian Friel's Translations. He won an acting award for his work in Sean O'Casey's The Plough And The Stars at the Royal Exchange Theatre. Then John Boorman saw him playing Lennie in a Dublin production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, and cast him as Sir Gawain in 1981's Excalibur. There can't be many roles that Liam Neeson hasn't tackled at some point in the past 25 years, slipping comfortably into a variety of roles from bow-tied sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to Irish freedom fighter Michael Collins; and from Narnia's top cat Aslan to Qui-Gon Jinn, who unforgivably saves Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace.

"I remember hearing that the story was going to revolve around two Jedi: an older Jedi and a younger Jedi. So I got my agents to find out about it. I met George (Lucas] in London, we had lunch and we talked about rearing kids, and he suggested books I should read on disciplining them. And that's what we talked about. We never talked about Star Wars. At the end of it, I said, 'For what it's worth, I'd really like to do your film.'"

In 1994, his measured portrait of factory owner Oskar Schindler earned him Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe nominations. "I did a lot of research, but I found it was best not to do too much because I was playing a guy who lived in 1942. If I'd read all the Holocaust literature, it would have played into my performance. Ignorance was bliss, certainly for Schindler. It was one of the first times where Steven didn't use a storyboard. And I loved the fear he brought on set every morning. Because there were days where he didn't know where to put the camera."

Now an upcoming project reunites Neeson with his Schindler's List collaborator– and like Schindler, the progress to the screen has been a stately one. It feels like four score and seven years since Spielberg optioned the rights to Doris Kearns Goodwin's unfinished Abraham Lincoln biography back in 2001, but Neeson has kept faith with the project since he agreed to play the 16th US president. Inevitably, the film has generated controversy before the first foot of film has been shot. "And Sean Connery as George Washington," sniffed Entertainment Weekly, when it broke the news.

Still, Neeson has been diligently researching the founder of the Republican party, and although young Lincoln was a gifted boy wrestler rather than a boxer, both men loom over most of their peers at precisely 6ft 4ins tall and both are drawn to high-minded ideals. "I spent a week down in Washington last June and I had access to this extraordinary Lincoln memorabilia. I put my hand on the Bible that he was sworn in on in 1860. I held his wallet that he died with. These people just opened doors for me. I went to his birthplace. I did the whole thing. The more I read about him, the more I admire him."

• Taken is released September 26

Legendary roles

Neeson's most renowned parts have been playing actual
historical figures and next he takes on Abraham Lincoln in a Steven Spielberg biopic. The US president will be the latest in a long line...

Schindler's List, 1993

The role that made Neeson was that of Oskar Schindler, the vain businessman who tried to make his fortune during the Second
World War and ended up an unlikely humanitarian. It was based
on the true story of the man who managed to save
1,100 Jews from being killed at Auschwitz.

Rob Roy, 1995

Next Neeson took on the legendary Scot Robert Roy McGregor. Sadly it all came a bit too soon after Braveheart and got buried in the tartan fanfare.

Michael Collins, 1996

This time Neeson got the chance to play someone from his own country in Neil Jordan's film. The titular Collins was the 'Lion of Ireland' who led the IRA against British rule and founded the Irish Free State in 1921.

Kinsey, 2004

His raunchiest role by far. Neeson donned a bow tie and won himself another Oscar nomination as Alfred Kinsey, the zoology professor turned sexual revolutionary.