All roads lead to Ashvegas: Actress Natasha Richardson met husband Liam Neeson in mountains of WNC while filming movie Nell

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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File this in the “all roads lead to Ashvegas” file: Actress Natasha Richardson, who died yesterday, met her future husband, Liam Neeson, while filming the movied Nell here in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

First, the tragic story:

The 45-year-old actress died just a day after being flown to Manhattan from Montreal with a brain injury suffered in a minor skiing accident at Mont Tremblant in the Laurentians.

Richardson fell on the beginner’s slope and appeared to be fine. But an hour after returning to her room she began to suffer headaches and once she was taken to hospital it became clear that the injury was critical. Rumours emerged almost immediately that she was ‘brain dead’.

Many members of her family, including her mother Vanessa Redgrave, her younger sister Joely Richardson, and her two teenage boys were able to visit her at the Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan before she died yesterday evening. Neeson had immediately left the set of a film he was shooting in Toronto to be at her bedside, first in Montreal and then in New York.

A little background on the movie Nell, which starred Jodie Foster and featured Richardson and Neeson as two doctors working on the case of the primitive mountain girl: The movie was filmed in 1994, the same year the two married; film locations for Nell included a cabin on Fontana Lake; Angel Hospital in Franklin; and the city of Charlotte.