Dame Helen’s Love for Ireland

Home

Community

Irish World

Travel

Ireland

Roots

News

Shopping

Dating

Search

Irish Voice

Columnists

Classifieds

WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

Read newsletters

Enter your e-mail address to receive our weekly e-Newsletter:

Irish Voice Entertainment

Dame Helen’s Love for Ireland

October 17, 2007

Her book is titled In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures, and while it’s already been released in Ireland and the U.K., where the British-born Mirren is a legend, it won’t be available in the U.S. until next February.

Mirren’s memories of Ireland are plentiful – she’s made four films there, and she visited Dublin last week to promote her book and to speak at Trinity College. Writing of her time with Neeson she revealed, “A place that became very dear to me is Ireland. I made three of my most important films there, and along the way had a wonderful relationship with an Irishman, Liam Neeson.

“He was from Northern Ireland and had grown up Catholic in a very Protestant town, Ballymena, home town of Ian Paisley. When Liam took me to meet his family, I was terrified. I was so wrong for Liam, in every way.

“I was British, I was irreligious and I was older than him. I needn’t have worried. His family was welcoming and gracious and I became very close to them.”

The couple, Mirren says, lived together for “four happy years,” and her book even includes two pages of black and white photos of Neeson that she took. “”When Liam first came to live with me in London, he needed photographs as an actor. We couldn’t afford a photographer, so I took all those pictures of him,” she says.

The age difference between the two – “eight years,” she pointed out to The Irish Times in an interview last weekend – bothered the now 62-year-old Mirren at the time.

“I wouldn’t think twice about it now, but it was different back then. The whole attitude has changed now, although, in fact, women had always lived with men who were younger than them. Of course, if I was 18, Liam would have been 10. That would not be a good idea. It would have been illegal!” she laughed.

Mirren is now married to the American director Taylor Hackford, while Neeson is wed to Natasha Richardson, with whom he has two sons.

Her next role will be alongside Brad Pitt in a remake of a BBC miniseries called State of Play. Mirren will play a newspaper editor, and one of the people she met with in Ireland to discuss the part and gain insight was Geraldine Kennedy, the editor of The Irish Times.

Share this story: digg this | Add to del.icio.us

Print Save Discussions

Discuss

Email a friend