Liam Neeson

Here's my caricature of Liam Neeson, the subject of the week at Caricaturama Showdown. As I've mentioned often on here, I do my caricatures by sketching from video reference rather than from photos, as I find I get a better feel for the design of the face and the personality of the subject. For this caricature, I started by watching Liam in the 1994 film, Nell, which starred Jodie Foster (who was also co-producer) in the title role of a young woman who has been raised in a log cabin in the backwoods of North Carolina, completely isolated from the outside world. Her mother was a stroke victim, paralyzed on one side of her face, so Nell grows up never hearing properly enunciated speech. When the elderly mother dies, Nell is left speaking what appears to be an unknown language when she is discovered by the sheriff and a concerned doctor played by Neeson.

It's a truly beautiful and touching film, even moreso in retrospect, as it was during the filming of Nell that Liam Neeson met and fell in love with his co-star, actress Natasha Richardson, who plays a psychiatrist in the film. They married soon thereafter and had a wonderful, stable, loving marriage until Natasha was tragically killed in a skiing accident in 2009. I acknowledged the tragedy at the time with this tribute, as I believe there were many people who felt so saddened for Liam in his great loss. It's hard to watch the film today and not shed some tears when you can tell how they were falling in love during its production. And in her performance as Nell, Jodie Foster is truly luminous, and shows what a gifted actress she has become in her years before the camera. A lovely and poignant film that I highly recommend if you have not yet seen it.