8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
Ray Liotta, of ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Field of Dreams,’ Dies at 67
He was known for his intensity, especially in crime dramas, but he was also adept at comedy. “You want to do as many different genres as you can,” he once said.
Ray Liotta, who created intense, memorable characters in “Goodfellas,” “Field of Dreams” and other films as well as on television, died in his sleep on Wednesday night or early Thursday in the Dominican Republic. He was 67.
His publicist, Jennifer Allen, said that he was filming a movie, “Dangerous Waters,” and died in his hotel room. She said the cause was not yet known.
Mr. Liotta was known primarily for having played Joey Perrini on the soap opera “Another World,” a character he once called “the nicest guy in the world,” when he landed an entirely different kind of role in the 1986 comic crime story “Something Wild.” His friend Melanie Griffith leaned on the film's director, Jonathan Demme, to consider him, and he got the role of her character’s menacing husband, an ex-con.
“Mr. Liotta, a newcomer, nearly walks off with his sections of the film,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review in The New York Times — and suddenly he was in demand for such parts.
ADVERTISEMENT
“I had offers for every crazy guy around,” Mr. Liotta told The Los Angeles Times in 1990.
But he resisted being “pigeonholed as Hollywood’s resident psychopath,” as one newspaper account put it. His next film after “Something Wild” was “Dominick and Eugene” (1988), in which he played a man whose twin brother (played by Tom Hulce) is mentally impaired as a result of a childhood accident.
“The two leading actors do a superb job of bringing these characters to life,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. “Mr. Liotta, such a menacing villain in ‘Something Wild,’ makes Gino a touchingly devoted figure, a man willing to sacrifice almost anything for his brother’s welfare.”
The next year he won acclaim as the baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson, the spectral figure who appears on the ball field built by Kevin Costner’s character in “Field of Dreams” and later brings along his teammates. Mr. Liotta showed a quieter type of intensity in embodying Jackson than he had in “Something Wild.”
“Ray Liotta makes him ethereal and real at once,” Caryn James wrote of his portrayal in her Times review, “a relic of an earlier age much more than a ghost from the past.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Though Mr. Liotta played sports in high school, he admitted that he didn’t quite get the concept of “Field of Dreams” at first.
“I read that script and said, ‘What, are you kidding me? A dead guy who comes back to play baseball?’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1990.
One role defined Mr. Liotta’s career more than any other: the gangster Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed 1990 film “Goodfellas.” That sprawling film was based on the real-life story of Mr. Hill, and Mr. Liotta said it challenged him like no job before.
“In this film, I had to show jealousy, rage, happiness, anger — everything was there,” he told The Associated Press in 1990. “You want to take that challenge as an actor. It was pretty intense.
“I had 80 costume changes, one day’s in the ’50s, the next day’s in the ’80s. Emotionally, it was all different things. One day I’m sweet. Then the next day I’m coked out of my mind. We’d span 20 years at one location.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Liotta said that acting alongside Robert De Niro and other Scorcese regulars was daunting. But he more than held his own in the film, which quickly came to be regarded as a classic.
“Ray Liotta, best known for his role as Melanie Griffith’s explosive husband in ‘Something Wild,’ brings an oddly appropriate quality of innocence to Henry,” Mick LaSalle wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle. Mr. Liotta’s performance, he said, was “likely to make him a major star.”
Mr. De Niro was among those paying tribute on Thursday.
“I was very saddened to learn of Ray’s passing,” he said in a statement. “He is way too way young to have left us.”
A wide range of roles followed “Goodfellas,” many of them in crime dramas like “Hannibal” (2001), “Narc” (2002) and “Killing Them Softly” (2012). Last year Mr. Liotta appeared in the “Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark.” He played his share of comic parts too, including in “Muppets” movies and “Operation Dumbo Drop” (1995), but intensity was his defining feature.
“Ray can be very still, almost like a cat,” Howard Deutch, who directed him in the 1992 comic drama “Article 99,” once said. “He’s very powerful in his stillness. You have the sense that he’s combustible.”
Mr. Liotta, according to his biography on imdb.com, was born on Dec. 18, 1954, in Newark. At 6 months old he was adopted by Alfred and Mary Liotta, who together operated an auto parts business. He grew up in Union, N.J.
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Liotta often said he got his start in acting by accident. An argument with his basketball coach got him tossed off the team, the drama teacher asked if he needed something to do, and he found himself in a stage production of “Sunday in New York.”
He studied acting at the University of Miami and, after graduating, settled in New York, where he quickly landed the part on “Another World.”
“I loved the soap,” he said in a 1994 interview. “I had an opportunity to make dialogue that wasn’t good seem bearable. The acting challenge was greater than if I was doing Tennessee Williams.”
In 1998 Mr. Liotta took on the assignment to portray Frank Sinatra in an HBO movie, “The Rat Pack.” It was a challenge he hesitated to accept.
“At first it was like, ‘Do I look enough like Sinatra?’” he told The Chicago Sun-Times. “Finally, I had to say: ‘I’m from Jersey, I’ve got blue eyes, I’m close enough.’”
ADVERTISEMENT
His television résumé also included the mini-series “Texas Rising” in 2015 and the crime drama “Shades of Blue,” with Jennifer Lopez, which ran for three seasons beginning in 2016. In 2005 he won an Emmy Award for outstanding guest actor in a drama for an appearance on “ER.”
Mr. Liotta didn’t do much stage work, but he did appear on Broadway in 2004 in the Stephen Belber comedy “Match,” opposite Frank Langella and Jane Adams. The show, however, ran for only seven weeks.
Mr. Liotta, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by a daughter, Karsen Liotta, from his marriage to the actress Michelle Grace, which ended in divorce; a sister, Linda Liotta Matthews; and his fiancée, Jacy Nittolo.
Though Mr. Liotta was most identified with roles of smoldering intensity, he said he always tried to avoid being typecast.
ADVERTISEMENT
“You want to do as many different genres as you can, and that’s what I’ve been doing,” he told Long Island Weekly in 2018. “I’ve done movies with the Muppets. I did Sinatra. I did good guys and bad guys. I did a movie with an elephant. I decided that I was here to try different parts and do different things.
“That’s what it’s really all about. That’s what a career should be.”
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
Ray Liotta in ‘Goodfellas’: How the Right Actor Turned the Right Part Into a Classic
His performance as Henry Hill includes many touches that weren’t in the script. But the producer didn’t want to cast him originally.
There’s a moment early in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic “Goodfellas” that always tugs at my heartstrings. Scorsese’s movie is brutal and cleareyed and unsentimental, yes. But Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, the viewer’s docent into the criminal world, injects a note of tenderness that’s all the more effective for coming out of the mouth of a slick sociopath. (The movie is based on the true-crime book “Wiseguy” by Nicholas Pileggi; the real Hill attained some celebrity in the wake of the picture’s release.)
It’s during the voice-over when Henry recalls as a boy envying the wiseguys who hung out at the pizza parlor and taxi stand across the street from his home. The guy who runs the pizza joint is Tuddy Cicero, brother of the mob underboss Paulie Cicero, for whom Henry will be working soon. Narrator Henry says the gangster’s full name and pauses. Then, in an exhalation that has low but strong notes of love and nostalgia, he adds, “Tuddy.”
Now mind you, Tuddy is eventually revealed to be as ruthless and coldblooded a gangster as they come. It is he who puts the bullet in the back of the head of Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) at the fraudulent ceremony at which Tommy is to become a “made man.” But here is Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, clearly still besotted with a childhood idol and the life he shared with the man. Liotta, who died this week at 67, fills Scorsese’s movie with dozens of equally revelatory touches.
ADVERTISEMENT
When I was researching “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas,’” my 2020 book about the film, I asked about that moment in the movie several times. The pause and the repetition of Tuddy’s name was not in the script drafts I saw. It was Liotta’s own touch. No one I spoke with remembered whether Liotta suggested it during the voice-over recordings or just added it himself. In any event, it works. Maybe too well, for people who believe that depiction is endorsement. In a movie that relentlessly examines the lure and transgressive thrill of amorality, Liotta’s depiction of Hill is the hook that draws the viewer in.
If you saw Hill on television or listened to any of his appearances on Howard Stern, you were likely to get the impression that Henry Hill was what your grandmother might call a schnook. While he did commit acts of violence both gang-related and domestic, he wasn’t intimidating. Edward McDonald, the prosecutor who got Hill and family into the witness protection program, and who plays himself in “Goodfellas,” told me that Hill was more a mob court jester than any kind of master criminal.
But Scorsese’s movie isn’t just about real-life gangsters — it’s also about how we mythologize them. “Movie stars with muscle” is how Hill characterizes his crew. And Liotta was a perfect Henry, able to turn on a dime from dry charm to deadly rage. In one of the movie’s famed tracking shots, when Henry escorts his future wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), into New York’s Copacabana nightclub by way of a side entrance, Liotta concocted all the bits of charming business a guy like Henry would use: tip a doorman here, shout out to a cook there, steer your date by the elbow lightly, act like it’s just what you’re due when the waiter flies out from the wings and sets a personal table at the side of the stage. Liotta got suggestions from Hill himself — and more from audiotapes of Hill speaking with Pileggi. But the research Liotta did into Hill’s world, and the inner work he did, was crucial.
The part came at a point when he might have been headed for a career as a character actor. He was unforgettable in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” as an ex-boyfriend of Melanie Griffith’s whose possessiveness explodes in still-shocking violence. And in “Field of Dreams” he played a reincarnation of the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson. Sometimes the crinkle in his eye reminded the viewer of the man’s corruption, but his portrayal was mostly of an awe-struck love of the game he could now play forever in a Midwestern cornfield turned ballpark.
ADVERTISEMENT
When “Goodfellas” was announced, more than one of its eventual cast members told me that it was the movie every New York and Los Angeles actor wanted in on. And Liotta was no exception. Everyone liked him for the part save the producer Irwin Winkler. He did not see the actor’s charm. In his book “A Life in Movies,” Winkler recalls Liotta coming to his table at a Santa Monica restaurant and asking for a word. “In a 10-minute conversation he (with charm and confidence) sold me on why he should play Henry Hill,” the producer wrote. When I interviewed Winkler, he said, rather sheepishly, “You heard the story of me not wanting Ray?” I told Winkler I had and said, “I can’t see anyone else doing it.” Winkler responded “Nor can I.”
As it happened, I was not able to interview Liotta himself for my book. Early talks with his publicist were promising. It was possible that I could get some time with him when he was in New York promoting “Marriage Story” at the New York Film Festival; then it wasn’t. We were both represented by the same agency; no dice. He was in a film on which a few close friends of mine were crew members. Can’t go there. And as I worked on the book, I heard several accounts of an intense, serious actor who, upon deciding he wasn’t going to do something, kept to that.
He had spoken about “Goodfellas” in other interviews, including an oral history that ran in GQ in 2010. The shoot had its challenges: He suffered the death of his mother halfway through and felt at least slightly shut out by male castmates like Robert De Niro and Pesci. Going through De Niro’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I came across a thank-you card from Liotta, and inside was a handwritten note: “Bob, Now I can tell you how much of a trip it was to work with you. You’re the best. Hope we can do it again. But I really mean Do it!” Liotta’s eagerness is palpable. The two did work together again, in “Copland.”
But “Goodfellas” was irreproducible. Because it did show off his range, and it is a landmark film. Liotta’s signature role is one any actor would hope to be remembered by.
No comments:
Post a Comment