Few actors have ever exuded tough-guy menace more than Ray Liotta—a persona solidified by his breakthrough performance in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas as real-life gangster Henry Hill, whose love of wealth and power (and its attendant pleasures) drives him to try to become a made man, and whose ego and fondness for cocaine contributes to his eventual downfall. Nonetheless, there was far more to the acclaimed actor than the iconic role, and it’s that fact which makes Liotta’s sudden passing in his sleep last night at the far-too-young age of 67 such a heartbreaking loss.
Tributes will invariably focus, first and foremost, on Liotta’s Goodfellas turn, and with good reason—this side of James Cagney, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino (as well as his co-stars Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci), no one is more closely associated with the mafia genre than the Newark, New Jersey native. Liotta inhabited Hill with a feverish resolve that immediately sold the character’s infatuation with his neighborhood’s Italian-American hoods, as well as the amoral greed, entitlement, and viciousness that allowed him to rise through the underworld ranks. Whether sweating, sneering, or—cue the beloved GIF—laughing with uninhibited gusto, his Hill was a figure of transfixing purpose and terrifying scalpel-sharp intensity. Consequently, he immediately became, per his opening line (“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”), the quintessential embodiment of the big-screen mobster.
It’s no surprise that Hollywood responded to Liotta’s Goodfellas performance—this arriving a few years after his fantastic Golden Globe-nominated work as a violent ex-con in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild—by sticking him in the B-grade thriller Unlawful Entry as a psychopath cop who terrorizes Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe. Yet as he’d already exhibited on TV (on Another World) and in 1989’s Field of Dreams (as ghostly Shoeless Joe Jackson), Liotta wasn’t a one-trick pony. While James Mangold reunited him with De Niro in 1997’s Cop Land (alongside Sylvester Stallone and Harvey Keitel), the writer/director tapped into Liotta’s bad-boy aura without rendering him a one-dimensional villain. Furthermore, the actor quickly began branching out, whether it was by transporting elephants in the Walt Disney comedy Operation Dumbo Drop, belting out Ol’ Blue Eyes tunes as Frank Sinatra in TV’s The Rat Pack, or playing an amusingly off-kilter version of himself during a stint on the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me.
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By the beginning of the new millennium, Liotta was a star who operated one notch below marquee status, meaning he could do great character work in a host of wildly diverse projects. He famously had his brains dined on by Anthony Hopkins’ serial killer—while conscious!—in Ridley Scott’s 2001 Hannibal. He was the responsible father whose cautionary warnings go unheeded by his drug-dealing son (Johnny Depp) in Ted Demme’s Blow. Better yet, he was absolutely electric as a detective (partnered with Jason Patric) on the trail of a cop killer in Joe Carnahan’s gritty, bleak, and highly undervalued 2002 neo-noir Narc—a lead performance that remains one of his finest, full of the ferocity, despair, and sorrow that so often defined his work.
Those weren’t the sole qualities Liotta was capable of bringing to the screen, however, as he so ably demonstrated in a variety of comedic roles, be it Wild Hogs opposite John Travolta and Tim Allen, Date Night with Steve Carell and Tina Fey, Muppets Most Wanted with Kermit and Ms. Piggy, or a guest spot on SpongeBob SquarePants. No one will make the case that any of those were superlative examples of the form, but Liotta—like so many memorably intimidating stars before him—knew precisely how to wield his reputation as a bruiser to amusing effect. Not that he had to be self-referential to get a laugh; his timing in Marriage Story as a cutthroat high-priced lawyer is so pitch-perfect (which is true of his entire performance, as anyone who’s been through a divorce will attest) that he elicits astonished chuckles simply by playing it straight.
Still, no matter the material, Liotta radiated don’t-mess-with-me energy, and thus it makes sense that he continually gravitated to parts that capitalized on his distinctive presence. Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly occasionally devolved into heavy-handedness, but not Liotta, who as a criminal gambler stood toe to toe with his illustrious castmates (including Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, and Ben Mendelsohn). He was similarly formidable in NBC’s Shades of Blue, in which he served as the corrupt-lieutenant foil to Jennifer Lopez’s crooked detective-turned-informant, as well as in Steven Soderbergh’s 2021 gem No Sudden Move as the bitter mob boss whose blackmail scheme is the engine propelling the thriller plot. While those projects didn’t push him to explore particularly novel territory, he elevated them—as he did everything else—with a force of personality that was never less than magnetic, and frequently more than a bit scary.
Though we haven’t seen the last of Liotta—thanks to a few already-completed films that will materialize over the next year or so—his most recent turn was certainly a great one to go out on. As “Hollywood” Dick Moltisanti, the father of Alessandro Nivola’s Dickie Moltisanti in David Chase’s The Many Saints of Newark, Liotta returned to the Jersey mob world that initially made him a star decades earlier, and he had a blast chewing scenery as a man of outsized appetites and cruelty. Moreover, he was afforded the opportunity to pull double-duty by also embodying Dick’s incarcerated brother Salvatore “Sally” Moltisanti, to whom Dickie visits in acts of quasi-confession – thereby allowing Liotta to display the full range of his chameleonic skills by playing two sides of the same (eternal, biblical) coin.
Still, Liotta’s legacy will forever revolve around Goodfellas, a once-in-a-lifetime performance that he pulls off with such rugged and cagey charm that it’s almost impossible not to root for his Hill, regardless of the heinous acts he perpetrates, the betrayals he commits, or the unrepentant and repulsive selfishness that defines him on his long, strange gangland odyssey from nobody to somebody to schnook. Liotta himself, however, was anything but: a towering, multifaceted and unforgettable talent who was always mesmerizing, and whose untimely death is immensely tough to take.
