Liam Neeson

Liam Neeson came out of Ballymena by way of Queen's University Belfast and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which is the part of the CV that explains the voice. He was a stage actor first, and a physically large one, and early films mostly used him for scale: a Jesuit in The Mission, then Darkman, the first lead role built entirely around his presence.

Schindler's List brought an Academy Award nomination and a decade as the profession's default figure of moral authority. It is worth being precise about what he does well, because it is not gravitas in the abstract. Neeson plays large men who are trying not to frighten anyone, and the tension between the size and the gentleness is the whole performance: Oskar Schindler talking his way through rooms he has no business being in, Qui-Gon Jinn losing an argument politely, Aslan, the priest at the start of Gangs of New York.

In 2008, at fifty-six, Taken made him an action star, which almost nobody manages that late. The run of thrillers that followed is a mixed inheritance. The good ones use the age instead of hiding it: The Grey is genuinely bleak, A Walk Among the Tombstones is a proper detective picture, Widows uses him sparingly and well. The interchangeable ones are interchangeable, and there are a lot of them. Lately he has started playing the joke rather than the archetype, most obviously by taking over Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun, which suggests he knew exactly what the last fifteen years looked like from outside.