Still struggling with her loss. Liam Neeson and the late Natasha Richardson’s son Micheál recently opened up about his mother’s fatal head injury during an interview with The Sunday Times. The 19-year-old now admits that he turned to drugs and alcohol to cope after her death.
“In my mind, subconsciously, I either pushed it out or stored it deep inside,” said Micheál, who was 13 at the time of the actress’ passing. “And so, within the next week I was like ‘Okay, on with my life.'”
That all changed, however, last spring. “Things just started going downhill. The people I was with, we were partying a lot. It was dark. I hit rock bottom,” he told the newspaper. “Everybody said, ‘This kid has lost his mum, that’s where the problem comes from.’ And I was like, ‘No, it isn’t, I just like to party.’ But looking back I realize it was a delayed reaction.”
Micheál later picked himself back up with wilderness therapy, where he got sober by eating dehydrated food in the Utah desert for months.
Richardson and Neeson, 62, first met on Broadway in the early ’90s, and wed in 1994. (They also had son Daniel, now 18.) Back in March 2009, Richardson hit her head during a ski lesson in Montreal, Canada. After complaining of a headache back at her room, she was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead at age 45.
Micheál appears to be overcoming his demons, and is now interested in following in his parents’ footsteps with acting. His father would rather him be a farmer or bartender, but Micheál insists that his late mom would be proud.
“She never vocalized it, but I know that my mum liked the idea of me becoming an actor,” he told The Sunday Times. “She would have thought that was cool.”
Micheál’s father also recently opened up about the Parent Trap actress. In February 2014, he told Anderson Cooper that Bono helped his sons deal with the painful loss.
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“Bono is a pal, and he came ’round to have a dinner. And I remember he was sitting beside Micheál and, just out of the blue, he said, ‘What age are you Micheál?’ He said — Micheál said, ‘Thirteen.’ And [Bono] said, ‘Yeah, that’s the age I was when I lost my mum,'” Neeson recalled of the U2 rocker. “That was it. And it — I — I could’ve kissed him for it. He was, like, saying, ‘You know, I lost my mom at this age and I’m doing okay. And you will do okay, too.'”
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