Ray Liotta: A cackling, rugged actor, too dangerous for romantic roles

“I’d had such an up and down career,” Ray Liotta told The Irish Times just last September. “For the first 10 years, I didn’t even have a publicist. Boy, was I dumb.”

That career has ended unexpectedly suddenly. It has been announced that the actor has died in his sleep while in the Dominican Republic. Just 67, Liotta was shooting the thriller Dangerous Waters with Saffron Burrows. A rugged-faced man with a voice that could swing through all the emotions, he was known for playing the terrifying Ray Sinclair in Something Wild, the ghostly Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams and, more recently, hard-ass lawyer to Adam Driver’s fragile theatre director in Marriage Story.

Video game enthusiasts will have listened to hours and hours of his voice work as Tommy Vercetti in the game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. He will, however, always be best remembered as Henry Hill, an Irishman among Italians, in Martin Scorsese’s definitive mob drama Goodfellas from 1990.

Making good use of a throaty cackle that was all his own, Liotta managed to bring the audience with him as an ordinary Joe who got sucked into the gangster life before realising he would have to turn snitch or die.

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He caught the eye in several scenes, but was nowhere better than in the paranoid closing sections during which he juggles drug management and spaghetti sauce while police helicopters circle above. Few other actors could have managed to balance the comedy and the desperation so effectively.

That role should have launched him into a career to rival that of his Goodfellas co-star Robert DeNiro. That didn’t quite happen. But he remained a reliable performer who bridged the gap between leading man and character actor.

There was perhaps too much danger about him to permit casting as a romantic leading man. But if you needed someone to growl in the corner then Liotta wouldn’t let you down.

He was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. Adopted from an orphanage at just six months by Alfred and Mary Liotta, he later hired a private detective to track down his Irish mother. It seems the reunion went well, but he remained attached to the Italian-American milieu in which he was brought up and stayed close to the pals he had made back in kindergarten.

It sounds like a busy childhood. Both parents ran unsuccessfully for office as Democrats. Liotta excelled at sport and, when at university, dabbled in student productions of Cabaret and The Sound of Music.

“I didn’t know anything about acting but I guess my sister was pretty dramatic,” he told Tara Brady in that interview last year. “I graduated high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought I’d work in construction or whatever.”

He remembered arriving at the University of Miami and finding himself in the queue for maths and history classes.

“I didn’t really want to take math and history,” he said. “And right next to my line of registration was the drama department line. I took a step over.” Ray Liotta was not the first actor to fall into the profession half by accident.

He moved to New York before graduation and landed jobs from the off. He gained a sort of fame as Joey Perrini in NBC’s Another World, one of the big daytime soap operas, but by then he had an inkling he might go further. Liotta moved to Los Angeles and began scratching up auditions for movies.

His first film role was in a legendarily awful adaptation of Harold Robbins’s The Lonely Lady from 1983, but that embarrassment was forgotten with his breakthrough as the hoodlum who terrorises Jeff Daniels in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild in 1986. He was sufficiently terrifying to secure a Golden Globe nomination.

Three years later, he gave a surprisingly sweet performance as the spirit that animated Kevin Costner’s cornfield in Field of Dreams. Then came Goodfellas.

The air always sparked when he came on screen. He has rarely been better than as the pugilistic, hard-talking — but ultimately frank — attorney in Marriage Story. Laura Dern won the Oscar for playing his opposition, but she may not have got there without Liotta to play against. He surely would have delivered many more jagged performances if he had not been taken so soon and so suddenly.

“People will come up and tell me their favourite movie is Goodfellas,” Lorraine Bracco, his co-star in that film, said on hearing the news. “Then they always ask what was the best part of making that movie. My response has always been the same…Ray Liotta.”