MOVIES : It Doesn’t Hurt to Be a Hunk Too

Seven years ago, when Liam Neeson was still largely an unknown Irish actor, he somehow knew enough to repair to Le Dome down on Sunset to celebrate landing his first Hollywood agent. A very public industry watering hole and a whole continent away from his neighborhood pub back in dreary Clapham. But Harris and Goldberg had been the first guys “who didn’t do this at me,” he says wagging his hand like a chattering duck’s beak, and he had thought then, looking around at the bar’s glossy denizens “that this L.A. thing would be OK.”

There was no mystery to his arrival. Los Angeles was the center of “the whole bloody film industry,” and the actor, a former amateur boxer with a 6-foot-4 camera-ready frame and a resume listing toward Sean O’Casey and Brian Friel dramas wanted to go where the action was. He’d already played Belfast, Dublin and London in the 10 years since leaving Ballymena, County Antrim, the rural town where he was born in Northern Ireland. Yes, Los Angeles was inevitable. “I’m a gypsy,” he says. “You go where the work is.”

Neeson stares morosely into his orange juice, where a pert foam betrays something more fortifying than Vitamin C. “I think it was Orson Welles who said L.A. is like a big cozy rocking chair; you sit down and by the time you get up, 40 years have passed.”

There is a knock at the door of this Manhattan hotel suite where the actor, who is juggling three concurrent projects--Broadway’s “Anna Christie”; “Ethan Frome,” his new film, and Steven Spielberg’s upcoming “Schindler’s List”--has been sequestered for a day-long bout with the media. “Susan,” he calls to his publicist, “there’s someone here, darlin’.” More orange juice is wheeled in. But like some J. Crew-clad Rodin sculpture, a denim shirt and dark corduroys wrapping his massive bulk, Neeson sits immobile on the hotel suite’s sofa. It is his last week in Manhattan before “Schindler’s List” begins shooting in Poland and he lifts his head, its crushed handsomeness, toward the window.

“I was brought up in weather like this,” he says, nodding at the gray Edward Steichen tableau visible from the 39th floor. “I still get a kick out of waking up in Los Angeles. The sunshine, you know. But I don’t think I’ll stay there too much longer.”

If Neeson’s subdued mien has its roots in his heritage, “the Celtic gloom and doom,” as he puts it, it is also indicative of the career vicissitudes besetting the 40-year-old expatriate actor who has spent more than a decade trying to put his brogue and his broken-nosed visage in the service of the American film industry.

After playing bit parts in “The Bounty” and “The Mission,” Neeson broke through with acclaimed performances in “Suspect” (1987), “The Good Mother” (1988) and most notably “Darkman” (1990). But subsequent appearances in “Shining Through,” “Under Suspicion” and “Leap of Faith”--all box-office and critical disappointments--eroded his currency. A blip of interest attended his partnering of Mia Farrow in Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives,” but it was nothing like the attention Neeson has received for an unlikely career-enhancer--playing Mat Burke, the brawny coal stoker in the revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie.”

“I know I’m sounding pessimistic, but all this flavor-of-the-month stuff . . . ,” says Neeson, who last year bought a loft in Manhattan with the intention of dividing his time between the coasts. “I was never really into grabbing at success, I was just content to be working; I did like 16 projects in five years. But the older you get, the more you whittle down what’s good, what’s important. In L.A., the hierarchy is film stars all the way. There is a terrible false sense to it. New York is a real city, where nobody gives a damn who you are and what your profession is.”

Yes, well, perhaps spending three months bare-chested on Broadway in the surprise hit of the season will do that to a man, especially when his American stage debut has been compared to Marlon Brando’s.

As a somewhat breathless John Lahr wrote in the New Yorker, “Not since Brando tossed meat up to Stella in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ has flesh made such a spectacular entrance.” Other descriptions of Neeson: “a sequoia of sex,” “a force of nature” and “catnip to women.” Variations on the beefcake theme also cropped up in the New York Times, where Frank Rich described Neeson’s arrival on Broadway as attended by all “the expected simian sexuality.”

Neeson, who in person exhibits a far more restful and self-deprecating demeanor behind a pair of tortoise-shell glasses and a practiced folksy reticence, is less sanguine about this sudden celebrity.

“Darling, my life has changed,” he says, wryly mimicking a brittle British accent. “No, doing ‘Anna Christie’ has made me rediscover why I wanted to be an actor. You’re working with a master writer, which is both a blessing and a curse. You go back to L.A. and people say, ‘This is the best script ever written,’ and you go, ‘Yeah, I guess it will make $20 million.’ ”

Neeson’s demurrers aside, his career has been given a palpable boost since “Anna Christie” opened in January. New York’s Criterion Theater played to capacity houses before the production closed last weekend--including numerous Hollywood producers and directors eyeing Neeson and his co-star, Natasha Richardson. Most notably, Spielberg offered Neeson the coveted role of Oskar Schindler, the World War II German industrialist and Jewish sympathizer, after seeing the actor on stage. Meanwhile “Ethan Frome,” an “American Playhouse” production of Edith Wharton’s bleak novella, has gained an unexpected buzz prior to its theatrical release on Friday.

“Liam is a star and he has been one for some time now,” Richardson says. “If he is seen to be coming into his own now, it’s because people are just slow to catch on.”

His craggy but soft-spoken screen persona has been compared to Gerard Depardieu’s--”a dynamite combination of gentleness, strength and sex appeal,” according to Richardson. Yet Neeson has encountered frustratingly off-again, on-again, off-again success in the 12 years since John Boorman plucked the towering Irishman from a Dublin stage production of “Of Mice and Men” to play Sir Gawain in “Excalibur.”

He was the only son of a close-knit Catholic family, the kind of lower-middle-class Irish household where Neeson stood a greater chance of becoming a boxer than an actor. “I never dared to dream of it as a career,” he says. “Who ever became an actor from Ballymena?”

He landed his first acting job, at Belfast’s Lyric Theater, because of his height--playing “Big Jim” Larkin, the founder of the Irish Labor Movement. After several years doing stage work in Belfast and Dublin, the ambitious and restless actor moved to London. Five years later, Neeson was in Los Angeles. He read “for everything,” refusing to let his Irish accent and slightly off-center good looks--”I don’t look cutesy cute or have one of those cute noses that everyone seems to have in L.A.”--deter him.

“I could read American for people and I just didn’t let my accent be a problem,” he says. “Maybe I was naive.”

He made 12 movies in five years, but by the time “Leap of Faith,” failed--Paramount’s intended Christmas blockbuster starring Steve Martin took Neeson’s performance as a small-town Texas sheriff down with it--his career seemed to have plateaued.

“Liam has tremendous physical magnetism, but what’s held him back is his foreignness,” says John Madden, director of “Ethan Frome.” “He’s not an American, nor is he the kind of foreign star, like Mel Gibson, who can convince audiences that he is American.”

“Liam is daring in that he plays characters who have great physical magnetism but are who also stupendously innocent,” says David Leveaux, the director of “Anna Christie.” “That is inevitably (unusual) when the American cinema is alive with the sound of male actors scuttlingaway from that.”

Ask Neeson for an overview of his career, and the actor turns blustery. “I haven’t a clue, nor do I care,” he says. “Everybody has their own appeal or are more suited to some roles than others. Even Olivier had to deal with that. I just respond to good material. That comes from my repertory theater background where one day you’re playing an old man, the next day it’s the young juvenile lead and then you’re in the chorus of a Greek tragedy.

“With ‘Anna Christie,’ I think we all knew we were supposed to be doing that play at that time,” he says. “During those days of rehearsal, all the speculation about films, about ‘Schindler’s List,’ literally disappeared. It was if L.A. had burnt to the ground.”

Neeson reaches forward, puts his empty glass on the coffee table and fingers a cigarette from the pack of Marlboro Lights. He shifts awkwardly on the small sofa. Although he is affably polite--”his manners are impeccable, the old-fashioned kind,” says Richardson--Neeson seems discomfited by undue attention. Although the never-married Neeson has maintained a high profile in gossip columns linked with Barbra Streisand, Julia Roberts and Brooke Shields, at a small pre-release party for “Ethan Frome” at the chic Tribeca Film Center the night before, he reluctantly held court alongside Richardson in a far corner like some chain-smoking Gulliver dodging the Lilliputians.

And in an interview--the first since a newspaper account attributed less-than-flattering comments about actresses Debra Winger and Roberts to Neeson--he remains at a slight remove, wary, even bored. When asked about his well-publicized offstage life--and a possible relationship with Richardson--he turns snappish. “I’m not going to answer that,” he says. “She’s a married lady and it’s unbecoming of you and your newspaper to ask that.”

“Liam responds quite directly and emotionally to things,” Leveaux says. “Liam is in search of passion--not in a wild or sentimental sense, although that may be part of it. But he is in a pursuit of passion where the real attraction is the pursuit itself.”

Like any seasoned Hollywood star, Neeson responded with a resounding “maybe” when Richardson first approached him last winter about a revival of “Anna Christie,” the story of a woman’s redemption in the arms of a shipwrecked sailor. It had been nearly eight years since he had been on stage and certainly “Anna Christie,” one of O’Neill’s creakier plays, was not the likeliest of star vehicles. “I’d moved to Los Angeles to do films, not theater,” Neeson says. “You don’t want to commit because you’re hoping that someday somebody like Steven Spielberg might cast you in a film.”

But Richardson persisted. She had played “Anna Christie” in London the year before and she was convinced that Neeson was her ideal Mat Burke, and enough of a movie star to lure a Broadway audience. She also sagely dangled a limited eight-week contract.

“Liam is so physically right for the role because you believe he is a stoker, that’s he’s been around the world, that he’s had all those women and that he is at that point in his life where he is changing,” Richardson says.

However, it wasn’t until Neeson finished “Ethan Frome” and “Leap of Faith” and saw no new projects on the horizon that he signed on. Aware that he would need to “retune” for the stage, Neeson learned all his lines in advance so that rehearsals could be spent “doing this”--he stares into his visitor’s eyes--and “not this,” he says, looking down at an imaginary script. “If you try to approach O’Neill intellectually, you’ll fall flat on your face.”

“Liam is the kind of actor who gives the lie to that mystical distinction between the stage and the camera,” says Leveaux, who adds that Neeson’s Broadway debut also put an end to any suspicions on the part of audiences and critics that “we’re dealing with an Irish bimbo here,” as he says.

“Like Brando and Olivier, Liam has a great visceral attractiveness. But he also has fantastic stage instincts and he is daring in that he never softens the edges (of his characters), never takes the liberal way out and signals to the audience.”

Those same qualities were also attractive to director John Madden, who was searching for an actor to play Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton’s stoic but passionate New England farmer. Madden had been tapped by producer Lindsay Law to direct the $2.5-million adaptation of Wharton’s novella about sexual repression and with Richard Nelson’s terse script, the director needed an actor “who had the ability to be transparent in front of camera. With Liam you really can read his thoughts.”

Madden had cast Joan Allen and Patricia Arquette as Zena Frome and Mattie Silver, the two women in Ethan Frome’s life, and at a preliminary casting meeting “had drawn about 24 circles around Liam’s name.” However, conflicts with the actor’s shooting schedule on “Husbands and Wives” initially took him out of the running. When Allen’s film finished early, Neeson was unexpectedly available.

“I had read the script and I knew it was zero money but I felt it was something I could comfortably do,” says Neeson, who saw a kinship with his own upbringing in Northern Ireland and Wharton’s tale of twisted rural lives. “Country people are the same the world over. Everything you do is for the sake of the community and you don’t make waves.”

Neeson also agreed with Madden about deepening the relationships among the three protagonists--Frome, his wife and his lover --which are fairly polarized in Wharton’s original. “Ethan is a bit whiny in the book,” says Neeson, who wanted to avoid playing his character as victim of an abusive, withholding woman, but rather as a repressed lonely man who had emotionally abandoned his wife. “This guy has probably never held his wife,” he says. “This was a youthful woman and this guy probably never held her, let alone made love to her. She’s become his mother even though they share the same bed. And her being ill is like a cry for attention.”

Neeson was also intent on putting his own physical stamp on the role. Although he plays a robust if laconic young farmer for most of the film, some sequences require Neeson to imitate an older man battling the effects of a sledding accident: a massive limp that the actor came up with in a meeting with Madden in a New York restaurant.

“The place was pretty empty,” Madden recalls. “But he ran to the opposite end of the room and began hobbling toward me. He has an extraordinary mix of intuition and technique.”

“I felt it was important that Ethan wasn’t seen as a cripple with polio but someone who was very gnarled and twisted and strange, like much of the landscape up there,” Neeson says.

Despite the physical demands of the film’s arduous shoot during seven weeks in St. Johnsbury, Vt., last winter, Joan Allen suggests that Neeson is the kind of actor who works best “with his eyes. He has a real sense of the film medium and he is very good at being subtle.”

“I’m not a Method actor but you do employ a bit of Stanislavski,” says Neeson, who found one of the film’s most satisfying moments the seduction scene between himself and Patricia Arquette--a nearly wordless sequence in which Neeson touches his lips to a piece of embroidery held by Arquette. “It’s not always about two sweaty bodies,” he says. “Acting is about playing moments. You have to believe (in the moment) because the audience can tell when you’re not thinking.”

Now, Neeson is bringing that same awareness to his next role as Oscar Schindler, the hero of Thomas Keneally’s novel about the German responsible for saving 1,300 Jews during World War II. After meeting the actor some years ago in London during the filming of “Empire of the Sun,” and seeing his work in “Husbands and Wives,” Spielberg invited Neeson to read for the role last fall. “I think he was impressed by something in the film,” says Neeson, who nonetheless arrived for the reading dressed as the German factory owner. “I hired a costume, had my hair cut, the whole thing”--but it took his performance in “AnnaChristie” to land him the role.

Neeson spent his off-hours from the play preparing for the film, which began shooting last week in Poland. He worked with a dialogue coach and studied film footage of Schindler in his 60s, taken just two years prior to his death. “You want to be truthful but you have to be careful that you don’t wind up acting an accent,” says Neeson.

“Schindler had a wonderful look in his eyes and he had a great physical quality to his voice,” Neeson says, dropping into a surprisingly caressing German accent. “He made people feel at ease. ‘You must have some more wine; it is very good for you,’ ” he says playfully leaning toward his visitor. “He was very seductive.”

After “Schindler,” Neeson says he has no specific plans, beyond spending “more time in New York.” When pressed he concedes an interest in working with “Wim Wenders, Scorsese, Eastwood and Gene Hackman, if he ever decides to direct”--and admiration for Gerard Depardieu, “his spirit, his vulnerability and the fact that he makes five or six movies a year.”

Colleagues say that the disappointment of “‘Leap of Faith,” and the unexpected success of “Anna Christie,” have had an effect on him. “He is serious but curiously uncalculating about his career,” Leveaux observes. “He may have thought there was something for him in California, but I think playing Broadway has made him skeptical of Hollywood’s machinery.”

“I hate the word career ,” Neeson says. “Everyone always talks about actor’s careers, but I would hate to know what I was doing in six months.

“Look, I like to work,” he adds leaning forward and stubbing out his cigarette with some of the restlessness that propelled him from Ballymena and on to Los Angeles. “You’re only as good as your next performance not your last,” he says turning again to the window and the gray Manhattan skyline. “I don’t want to sit in my house in L.A.”