Liam Neeson is regarded as something of a favourite son in Ireland. We all feel a kinship of sorts with the big, soft Ballymena man, and inordinately proud of his movie roles in "Michael Collins" and "Schindler’s List" and "Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace."
 
Consequently the death of his wife Natasha Richardson has cast a pall over the country, not just because it is the passing of a great actress but because it is the bereavement of someone we feel we know, like a cousin or friend.
 
I can remember first seeing the young Liam Neeson one night at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in the 1970s when there was fierce rioting just a mile distant. Having lived for a short while in Ballymena myself, I felt he was a local lad making good and I have followed his career ever since, from the Lyric to the Project Arts Theatre and the Abbey in Dublin, then on to New York and Hollywood.
 
Just last week I went to see him perform in the film, "Five Minutes of Heaven,” set in Lurgan, Co Armagh. It was his first acting on location in Northern Ireland in nearly thirty years. It is the story of two men of middle age affected in different ways by the Troubles.
 
Alister Lyttle, played by Neeson, is a former loyalist terrorist who as a youth received an order to murder a Catholic, Jim Griffin, in the town of Lurgan (near where my mother’s family lived). He shot the man through the window of his house. The killing was witnessed by Griffin’s little brother Joe, whose mother never forgave him for not doing anything to stop the gunman.
 
Now grown up, Joe Griffin, played by James Nesbitt, has been invited to meet the killer for the first time in a Belfast television studio that is staging reconciliations for mass audiences.
 
The Protestant man is full of remorse but the dead man’s brother just wants to kill him. The film conveys a powerful message about the futility of violence, and the awful aftermath of untimely death.
 
My reason for mentioning this is that Neeson’s character cuts an extremely sad and empty figure in the movie, unable to cope with what he has done. So one can see here a foretaste, an enactment, of the terrible impact that the death of Natasha Richardson will have in real life on this most sensitive of actors.
 
I recall in particular one scene where Neeson, in black tie, is travelling in the back of a car, talking mournfully about “what happens after” a death. Anyone who watches this episode will see a grieving Neeson and inevitably feel a sense of grieving with him.
 
To promote the movie Neeson and Nesbitt appeared on Ryan Tubridy’s RTE show on February 21.  They were in great form. Both spoke about how joyous it was to see the changes in Northern Ireland and about bringing closure to what happened in the Troubles.
 
Who could have known that just two weeks later there would be the first killings in 12 years with the shooting of the two British soldiers in Antrim by the so-called Real IRA, or that just four weeks later Neeson’s wife Natasha would die in such a seemingly senseless way.
 
Describing the dramatic tension in the film to Tubridy, Neeson said “you are aware of the clock ticking” towards the climax of the film.

There was another clock ticking.
 
Many tributes have been paid, and rightly, to Natasha Richardson, who worried so much about her husband that she once persuaded him to stop tearing around on a Harley-Davidson. Many worry now that this awful tragedy will destroy the genial Ballymena man.
 
The SDLP Assembly Member for North Antrim, Declan O’Loan, said yesterday, “I know that the people of Ballymena will join with me in this expression of sympathy. There is immense pride here in the achievements of Liam Neeson as an internationally known actor of great distinction. His large family circle here in Ballymena and the surrounding area are very well known and highly respected. We are all thinking of them at this time of sadness.”