It's pretty hard to believe that it has been a whole decade since the cinema-going public first heard these words uttered:

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money but what I do have are a very particular set of skills.

"Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it.

"I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you."

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Most of you will - of course - recognise those lines as Liam Neeson's iconic speech over the phone to his daughter's captors in the film Taken, but who could have foreseen how much of an impact those few lines would have on the time since then.

It is the speech that launched thousands of memes, it has passed into popular culture lore more than just about anything else that has happened in the past decade.

It also re-launched Liam Neeson's movie career. Sure, Liam Neeson had done action films before, He'd starred in stuff like Batman Begins, Kingdom of Heaven, and Gangs of New York, but no-one could have envisaged him getting a huge shove into the world of action movie leading men.

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That includes Neeson himself. He told Entertainment Weekly: "I never focused on, 'Oh, I'd love to do action movies'. It wasn't really on my periphery.

"I read [Taken] and just thought, 'This would be great; just hang out with stuntmen every day and beat guys up'. I did think it would be straight-to-video, and that was no problem."

'Accidental' action hero Liam Neeson. Credit: PA

He continued: "I enjoyed doing that first Taken movie so much; I had no idea that it would lead onto other films and other action scripts.

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"They started sending me action scripts and you'd see 'Leading man, age 37' crossed out and 'late 40s, early 50s' written in instead. I feel very privileged, and a little bit guilty.

"I'm having fight scenes with guys half my age and I just can't stop laughing. It's just so silly on one level and great fun on another."

Given that they made a Taken 2 and a Taken 3, the public also love seeing Neeson in roles such as these.

To be fair, Liam Neeson is pretty good in most stuff. Credit: PA

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He's also starred in stuff like The Commuter, and Run All Night, which are basically like unofficial offshoots of the Taken series.

He may not have wanted to be an action hero, but he's certainly Taken to it.