A STAR IS FINALLY BORN

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

He was a man formed of charismatic muscle and countless contradictions. But the romantic profile cut by Irish rebel Michael Collins was not what gripped Liam Neeson so much as one enigmatic habit. "Here he was at one point the most hunted man in Europe," Neeson recounts, his subdued brogue suddenly acquiring crowded-pub volume, "and he stayed out in the open! The British looked for him in the shadows, and there he was wearing steel taps on his shoes, his walk a fierce click--always right there, always in your face."

Bold presence that goes unnoticed--now there is something Liam Neeson knows a bit about. With a 6-ft. 4-in. frame and a face that is memorably poetic in its asymmetry, Neeson, 44, has always possessed movie-star aura. But it took Hollywood nearly a decade to figure out how to capture it. By the time Neeson landed the role of Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg's monumental Holocaust elegy, the Irish actor had already appeared in 23 mostly unheralded films. And yet, even though Schindler's List won Neeson the kind of praise and splashy recognition (including an Oscar nomination for Best Actor) that had long eluded him, it was a film that belonged more to its harrowing subject matter and its celebrated director's vision than to its star.

With Michael Collins, the elegantly brawny actor finally has a made-to-fit picture he can rightfully think of as his own. "It is one of those movies where the entire film is defined by the central performance," concedes Collins director Neil Jordan. "And Liam carries the film through like a train. He never stops." To be sure, Collins provides Neeson with a lot of big scenes in which to holler and pound tables and make like a potential Academy Award winner, but the quieter moments are his most impressive ones. For example, in a scene in which Collins meets with a housemaid who has agreed to do some spying for him, Neeson throws her the kind of gently flirtatious smile that convinces us of Collins' charismatic energy in but an instant.

Even though it took him 13 years to bring Michael Collins to the screen, Jordan never had anyone but Neeson in mind for the role of the Irish revolutionary and guerrilla tactician. "Liam has got this terribly honest heart beneath everything," Jordan notes. "One of my worries was that the audience would perhaps lose sympathy for Collins because what he does is so ferocious, but halfway through I realized Liam could chop up his grandmother and he'd still be a sympathetic guy."

As was evident in his portrayal of Schindler, who saved 1,200 Jews from the horrors of Auschwitz but also had a cozy relationship with the Nazis, Neeson has a gift for depicting heroic men whose moral code is something short of Benedictine. "No one wants to see the flat good guy or bad guy that's just popcorn for the eyes," Neeson argues. "I'd hate for an audience every time they see me to think, 'Aw, the day is goin' to be saved--he's such a nice man.'"

Nice, no. Soulfully conflicted, surely. Neeson grew up Catholic in a small, rural hamlet in Northern Ireland. As a teenager he was torn between a passion for boxing and a love of theater. The world of Chekhov won out in the early '70s, when Neeson joined Belfast's repertory Lyric Players and then graduated to the renowned Abbey Theater in Dublin. There he first tackled drama that dealt with his country's fractious history--in his words, "a lot of Sean O'Casey." (The apolitical Neeson, however, still knew almost nothing about Collins when he came to the role.)

After working in numerous British feature and TV films, Neeson moved in 1985 to Los Angeles, where he began performing in a string of indifferently received movies like The Good Mother, with Diane Keaton, and Sam Raimi's Darkman. But he never forgot the stage, and it was his dynamic performance in a '93 Broadway revival of Anna Christie that convinced Spielberg he had found his Schindler.

At a 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 of writing." Indeed, it seems that Neeson hasn't quite let go of Schindler's List, the making of which must have been a deeply emotional experience. Ever since the film's release, the actor has immersed himself almost obsessively in the history of the Holocaust. He keeps a hoard of related memoirs by his bedside but continues to comb bookshops for that "survivor's story I may have not read." He claims he needed to make Nell, the 1994 film in which he co-starred with Jodie Foster, "as a break from the deadlock of reading these stories."

But as he 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.

He plans to get in front of the cameras again next year to play a very different kind of hero: Oscar Wilde. It will be interesting to see Neeson adapt his low-key ruggedness to that stylishly fastidious wit. Until then, it seems, Neeson is thinking of cultivating his inner lightweight. Now taking singing lessons, he and Richardson hope to bring their version of Camelot to Broadway. A gifted actor who dreams of being Robert Goulet? Liam Neeson really is as beguilingly complicated as he seems.

--With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York