Some actors define movies, while other actors are defined by movies. For an actor to be in the latter category is no slight — it means that they had the good fortune of playing a character so memorable in such an influential film that their careers become synonymous with their character. Think Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars or Elijah Wood as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Such was the case with Ray Liotta, who died last week in his sleep in the Dominican Republic. Liotta was a better actor than both Hamill and Wood, demonstrating as much in a variety of other performances over the course of an acting career that was much more versatile than he was sometimes credited for, but it was his role as Henry Hill in the classic 1990 mob movie Goodfellas that came to define him more than any other.
Liotta’s role as Hill is in some ways a great character-actor performance in the guise of, and containing the heft of, a leading role. And that is a demonstration not only of Liotta’s talent but of the fact that when he died at the age of 67, he was still in important ways becoming the actor he intended to be. Liotta’s career was, arguably, always on the way up.
Liotta was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1954 and raised in nearby Union. Liotta’s primary interest growing up was not film but sports. “I never wanted to be an actor,” Liotta said in a 2012 interview. He chose to study acting at the University of Miami, mostly because, as he recollected, the school’s requirements for liberal arts “sounded really hard” and also because when he looked to the other lines next to the liberal arts department registration line, he noticed that in the line for the drama department, “there was this really cute girl in line to register.” Whoever that girl was, she not only changed the course of Liotta’s life but the course of modern American cinema as well.
After graduation, Liotta moved to New York, where he worked as a bartender while pursuing an acting career. He received his first acting job in 1978, a part in the NBC soap opera Another World. Three years later, he moved to Los Angeles to begin a career in film. He earned his first role in the seedy 1983 movie The Lonely Lady, but his breakout role came in the 1986 Jonathan Demme comic drama Something Wild, where he impressed as a psychotic villain while acting alongside established Hollywood stars Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith. In 1988, he played Amadeus star Tom Hulce’s twin brother in Dominick and Eugene, and the following year, he received a part that would prove to be one of his most memorable — as the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson in the now-classic baseball drama Field of Dreams.
A year after that, he appeared in what belongs on the short list of greatest American films ever made: Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece Goodfellas, based on the 1985 Nicholas Pileggi book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. Scorsese gave Liotta the role of a lifetime — Henry Hill, a half-Irish, half-Italian boy from a working-class Brooklyn family who makes a life for himself in the mafia before being unmade by his lavish lifestyle and reckless criminal activities. Liotta’s performance as Hill, a simmering study of a human being driven to danger by unchecked desires, is extraordinary. As Hill, Liotta cycles through the entire gamut of human emotions — from humorous to diabolical to loving to passionate and raging, sometimes in a single scene. It is a performance that radiates intensity in a way few actors have managed to realize before or since, and it is a character that has influenced a generation of actors attempting to emulate it.
At one point in his life, it appeared as if Liotta would have a career similar to that of Robert De Niro — one iconic Scorsese leading role after another. His career, as we are now able to see it, took a trajectory closer to Christopher Walken’s — one or two truly outstanding leading performances surrounded by a constellation of quieter but excellent supporting performances. Although Liotta would never be able to replicate the success he had with Goodfellas — who could? — he continued to have a highly productive career in both film and television. More recently, as attested to by his crowd-pleasing role as a hard-charging divorce attorney in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), he was showing signs of becoming one of his generation’s great supporting actors by giving his supporting roles the energy and charisma of a leading man without preening or outshining the actual leads — and without becoming a caricature of himself.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
