Ray Liotta has died in his sleep in the Dominican Republic at the age of 67.
The Goodfellas actor had reportedly been on location filming the movie Dangerous Waters, his publicist Jennifer Allen said.
He was best known for playing mobster Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster film Goodfellas and also appeared in Field of Dreams.
Liotta got his big break playing ex-convict Ray Sinclair in 1986 black comedy Something Wild.
He got a Golden Globe nomination for that role and went on to star in the 1988 film Dominick and Eugene, about the strained relationship between twins with very different characters.
According to the BBC, last year he starred in the Sopranos prequel film The Many Saints Of Newark,having turned down a role in the original series.
The New Jersey-born actor said in 2016 that he regretted turning down the chance to audition for Tim Burton’s Batman film.
“When I did my first movie, Tim Burton was getting ready to do Batman and he was interested in me because he wanted it to be edgy and real.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that crime stories were his specialty — he was a great choice to narrate Inside the Mafia for the National Geographic Channel in 2005 — and he was superb as shady cops in Unlawful Entry (1992), Cop Land (1997) and Narc (2002) and as the voice of the mobster Tommy Vercetti in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
Amid a career resurgence, Liotta was quite busy recently, with big-screen roles in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move (2021) and Alan Taylor’s The Many Saints of Newark (2021) — as two members of the Moltisanti family in the Sopranos prequel — and a gig as a villain on the third season of the Amazon series Hanna.
“I thought, ‘Batman? That’s a stupid idea’, even though he had just done one of my favourite movies of all time, Beetlejuice. So yes, I regret not auditioning for that’.”
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Liotta was the adopted son of Alfred and Mary Liotta, who also adopted a daughter, Linda.
He attended Union High School where he excelled at sports and went on to attend the University of Miami. He studied drama and was cast in his first play, “Cabaret.”
Following his college graduation, Liotta moved to New York City where he got work in commercials and was cast as Joey Perrini on the daytime soap opera “Another World,” in which he appeared from 1978 to 1981.
His performance as crazed ex-con Ray Sinclair in the 1986 Jonathan Demme film “Something Wild” proved to be a breakthrough role for the actor.
