‘Goodfellas’ actor Ray Liotta dies
Ray Liotta, the blue-eyed actor best known for playing mobster Henry Hill in “Goodfellas” and baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson in “Field of Dreams,” has died. He was 67.
Liotta’s publicist, Jen Allen, said he was in the Dominican Republic shooting a new movie and didn’t wake up Thursday morning. Police in the Dominican Republic said they received a call just before 6 a.m. Thursday at a hotel where Liotta was staying with his fiancee and found the actor dead.
Robert De Niro, who co-starred with Liotta in “Goodfellas,” said in an emailed statement: “I was very saddened to learn of Ray’s passing. He is way too way young to have left us.”
Another “Goodfellas” star, Lorraine Bracco, who played Henry’s wife Karen Hill, tweeted Thursday that she could be “anywhere in the world & people will come up & tell me their favorite 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.”
Liotta was also mourned by Alessandro Nivola, who recently appeared with him in “The Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark,” and by the film’s writer and producer David Chase. Nivola called Liotta “dangerous, unpredictable, hilarious, and generous with his praise for other actors.” Chase said in a statement that “We all felt we lucked out having him on that movie.”
The Newark, New Jersey,
native was born in 1954 and adopted at age six months out of an orphanage by a township clerk and an auto parts owner. Liotta always assumed he was mostly Italian — the movies did too. But later in life while searching for his birth parents, he discovered he’s actually Scottish.
Though he grew up focused on playing sports, including baseball, during his senior year of high school, the drama teacher asked him if he wanted to be in a play, which he agreed to on a lark. Whether he knew it or not at the time, it planted a seed, though he still assumed he’d end up working construction. And later, at the University of Miami he picked drama and acting because they had no math requirement attached. He would often say in interviews that he only started auditioning for plays because a pretty girl told him to. But it set him on a course. After graduation, he got an agent and soon he got his first big break on the soap opera “Another World.”