LIAM Neeson has revealed he talks to his late wife ‘everyday’ and says she threatened to call off their wedding if he played James Bond.
The Irish star lost his wife Natasha Redgrave in 2009 after she sustained a fatal head injury while skiing in Canada.
He has never remarried, and raised their two sons Micheál and Daniel.
Speaking on the Conan Needs a Friend podcast, he said: “We still talk, she and I, every day.”
And asked how he is, he said: “I don’t believe in the word happy. Content is the state I aim for and contentment is the best feeling in the world. Happiness comes and goes.”
He also confessed that when Micheál was born in 1995 and Natasha got sick in hospital, she was given a very strange cure.
Liam said: “My first son was born in Holles Street, a very famous maternity hospital in Dublin and my wife, God love her, she gave birth to our son Micheál.
“But she was very, very anaemic, we didn’t realise this. And she needed something like 12 units of blood. I was about to start shooting Michael Collins, I’d cycle back home once the baby was born and all that, everything was ok.
“But suddenly there was this emergency, five, six nurses apparently come in and my wife is saying, ‘call my husband, please call my husband.’ And they’re going, ‘Ah it’s alright, don’t worry, it’s alright.’
“And it was alright, but they started giving her a bottle of Guinness every day.”
The couple were married for almost 15 years when she passed away.
But Liam said he was given a choice before they walked down the aisle – play James Bond or their wedding.
He explained: “They were interested in me after Schindler’s List. They were interested in a whole bunch of other actors. Some journalist seemed to think, ‘why did you turn down Bond?’ I wasn’t offered James Bond, I think I was on their radar for five minutes.
“When I first started getting a couple of calls from (Bond producer) Barbara Broccoli about would I be interested, and I said yeah, I would be interested.
“And Natasha and I weren’t married at the time and she said, ‘if you are offered James Bond, we’re not getting married.’.. ‘How was work today darling?’ ‘Ugh, these boring, horrible beautiful women, I can’t take it anymore.’”
He now is back in a new thriller film, Retribution, and said it ‘passed his tea test.’
“I have a ‘cup of tea’ test. If I get to page 5, say, and I say, I must make a cup of tea, that’s not a good sign. But I’d worked with these producers, these lovely guys, we’ve done three movies together…
“I knew it was going to be a thriller, I’d done one for the guys on an aeroplane that crashes, a train that derails and crashes so it’s got to be about a car. So this is about a car, driving a car. I spend 95 per cent of the movie in the car with my two kids in the back.
“The only problem is I’m trying to take them to school, I’m a financial advisor, banker, no skills. Driving through the streets of Berlin but unbeknownst to me I’m sitting on a bomb as are my kids and I’ve to follow these instructions – this anonymous person has left a phone in the car.
“Anyway I read the script in London, and I found it a real page turner, it was a real interesting good action piece.”