It was the one role that made Ray Liotta famous, a role in a Martin Scorsese film with Robert De Niro playing only the first supporting role. Ray Liotta stars as Henry Hill in GoodFellas, the errand boy who works his way up the mafia hierarchy and ends up in a frenzy of insanity, paranoia and drugs. Liotta, who hails from Newark, New Jersey, was 36 at the time—too old for young Hill, too young for old. But his performance also eclipsed that of the film’s major Scorsese actors, including Joe Pesci and Paul Sorvino.
Ray Liotta was adopted as a baby, and he only met his birth mother at the age of 40. Already in high school he wanted to be an actor and in 1978 he got a role in the television series “Another World”, which ran for three years. Back then, a television career mostly ruled out feature films. Still, Liotta had a role in The Lonley Lady (1983) and then her first typically Liotta-esque appearance in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986): Melanie Griffith is dangerous, but Ray Liotta is more dangerous. Some say Demme hasn’t made a better film than this screwball comedy on the run, in which the Feelies perform at a class reunion.
Ray Liotta’s face is unforgettable in Field of Dreams, the baseball fantasy starring Kevin Costner, in which Liotta plays the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson, the man who comes out of the cornfield. If you build the field, then they will come! And so it happens. Along with Burt Lancaster, Ray Liotta entered the American myth.
After GoodFellas, Liotta appeared in scary films – Fatal Desire, Escape from Absolom, Operation Dumbo. In an episode of “Frasier” (1995) he was already Ray Liotta as a quote, namely as a voice. Then in 1997 he starred in James Mangold’s elegiac cop ballad Cop Land alongside Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. Evil flashed across his face.
Uncanny presence
Two years later he haunted The Muppets from Space. He can be seen in Hannibal (2001), the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, in an extraordinarily unsavory scene with Anthony Hopkins, and in the same year’s Blow opposite Johnny Depp. Liotta’s eerie presence is seen in the Emergency Room (2004) episode “Hour of Death,” where he occupies the entire ER in bed by telling his life story. For this he received an Emmy in 2005.
He then played small and micro roles – in “Hannah Montana”, in a sequel to “Field of Dreams”, in B-movies and television series. In “The Place Beyond The Pines” (2012) he had a role befitting his status alongside Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper. It was the next generation. Young people saw him in an Ed Sheeran video, in Modern Family, in Young Sheldon.
Noah Baumbach cast Liotta as Adam Driver’s divorce attorney in Marriage Story (2019) – Alan Alda played the other attorney. Once again he is frighteningly funny. His role in The Many Saints Of Newark (2021), the prelude to The Sopranos, completes the circle: Liotta returned to New Jersey.
Ray Liotta died Thursday (May 26) at the age of 67 while filming in the Dominican Republic. Lorraine Bracco, his co-star on GoodFellas, says, “When I’m asked what the best part about GoodFellas was, I always say Ray Liotta.”
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