The “nice guy” who starred in Goodfellas
In the late 1980s, Ray Liotta heard that Martin Scorsese was making a film about Henry Hill, a New Jersey mobster who’d worked for the Lucchese crime family before turning FBI informant. Liotta was so keen to play Hill he approached Scorsese directly, in a hotel lobby during the Venice Film Festival. A relative unknown at the time, he was rebuffed by bodyguards, but Scorsese saw something in the way Liotta interacted with the heavies that sparked his interest, and he agreed to meet him. The film’s producers had wanted a big-name actor. Scorsese, however, persuaded them that Liotta could convey just the blend of swagger and paranoia, charm and menace that the part required. His performance in Goodfellas, with his evocative narration (“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”) made his name. He never matched its success; but Liotta, who has died aged 67, was philosophical about that. “If you got one movie that people remember, that is great,” he told The Guardian. “If you got two, that’s fantastic.”
Born in 1954, he was abandoned by his birth mother, and spent six months in an orphanage before being adopted by Mary and Alfred Liotta, who brought him up in comfort in New Jersey. At school, sport was his passion. But in his last year, the drama teacher asked him if he would like to be in a play, and he carried on acting at the University of Miami. His break came when he was invited to appear in an advert, which led to a role on a soap opera. He moved to LA, and made his film debut in 1983. Three years later he was cast as Melanie Griffith’s psychopathic husband in the comedy thriller Something Wild. Although he wasn’t on screen long, his menacing performance won him a Golden Globe nomination. Suddenly, he was inundated with offers of “psycho” roles, but he turned them all down, for fear of being typecast; he had never so much as been in a fight, and related more easily to “nice guys”. His next big part wasn’t until 1989, when he played one of the ghostly baseball players in the Kevin Costner tearjerker Field of Dreams.
Goodfellas was a tough shoot. His mother died during it; he had to hold his own against established stars such as Robert De Niro; he was in almost every scene, and the part was challenging. “I had to show jealousy, rage, happiness, anger – everything was there,” he said. “I had 80 costume changes; one day’s in the 1950s, the next day’s in the 1980s. One day I’m sweet. Then the next I’m coked out of my mind. We’d span 20 years at one location.” Goodfellas led to more tough guy roles, in films such as Cop Land, but he did sometimes escape them: in 1994 he played a lonely widower in Corrina, Corrina.
More recently he’d won plaudits for his turn as a lawyer in Marriage Story (2019), and starred in the Sopranos spin-off The
Many Saints of Newark (2021). He’d rejected a role in the TV series, though it would have reunited him with Lorraine Bracco, his on-screen wife in Goodfellas. Paying tribute to him last week, she wrote that wherever she goes, people “come up and tell me their favourite movie is Goodfellas. Then they always ask what was the best part of making that movie. My response has always been the same... Ray Liotta.” He is survived by his daughter, from his marriage to the actress Michelle Grace, and his fiancée.