Liam Neeson has spoken openly recently about his love affair with wife Natasha Richardson, who died five years ago after a tragic ski accident left her with severe injuries. But one thing his fans may not know is that he proposed to another actress before he and Natasha met, and she predicted that he would fall in love with his next leading lady.
Brooke Shields says in her new memoir, There Was A Little Girl, that she dated Neeson briefly in 1992 before he proposed to her, but that Christmas, he told her he had to fly to L.A. and left her in New York. He never came back, but Shields says it wasn’t meant to be.
“He came back after the first time he left me and asked me to marry him again. This was before he started to do a play (Anna Christie). And I said, ‘No, no, no, because knowing you, you’ll probably fall in love with your next leading lady and marry her, so I’m leaving myself out of this.’ And I was dead right,” she told People.
Neeson did just that, and married Richardson in 1994. The couple enjoyed a loving marriage until her death, which devastated Neeson.
“She was on life support…I went in to her and I told her I loved her, said ‘Sweetie, you’re not coming back from this, you’ve banged your head’…she and I had made a pact, if any of us got into a vegetative state that we’d pull the plug…that was my immediate thought…’Okay, these tubes have to go. She’s gone’,” he said.
Neeson says that even after five years, he can’t get used to the idea that his wife is gone. He shared his heart-wrenching story with Anderson Cooper, saying her death doesn’t seem real.
“[Her death] was never real. It still kind of isn’t. There’s periods now in our New York residence when I hear the door opening, especially the first couple of years…anytime I hear that door opening, I still think I’m going to hear her…It hits you. It’s like a wave. You just get this profound feeling of instability…the Earth isn’t stable anymore and then it passes and it becomes more infrequent, but I still get it sometimes.”