Ray Liotta
Movie Actor — born 1954
Ray Liotta is an American actor and producer best known for his portrayal of ‘Henry Hill’ in ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Detective Oak’ in ‘Narc’.
Ray Liotta was an American actor whose four-decade career produced American film roles — including his Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990), one of the American mob films of the 20th century. He was born Raymond Allen Liotta on December 18, 1954, in Newark, New Jersey. He was adopted at six months old by an Italian-American family — Alfred Liotta and Mary Edgar Liotta — who raised him in Union Township, New Jersey. He attended the University of Miami (B.F.A. in fine arts, 1978) and worked odd jobs in his early twenties before pursuing acting professionally.
His acting career began with the 1978 NBC daytime soap opera Another World (1978–1981). His film breakthrough came in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (1986, in which he played the abusive ex-husband Ray Sinclair opposite Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith). His role came in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) — the three-hour mob biopic about Henry Hill, the real-life Lucchese-crime-family associate. Liotta's Henry Hill — combined with Robert De Niro's Jimmy Conway and Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito — has been continuously cited as one of the American screen-acting ensembles of the 1990s.
His subsequent film career produced multiple substantial roles including Phil Alden Robinson's Field of Dreams (1989, in which he played Shoeless Joe Jackson opposite Kevin Costner), Cop Land (1997, opposite Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro), Hannibal (2001, the Hannibal Lecter sequel), Narc (2002), Identity (2003), Killing Them Softly (2012), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), and Marriage Story (2019).
He died on May 26, 2022, at age 67, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic — where he was filming the indie thriller Dangerous Waters. He had been continuously busy with film and TV roles up to his death — including the 2021 Sopranos prequel film The Many Saints of Newark, in which he played dual roles. He had been with actress Jacy Nittolo since 2020.
His name Ray is the English short form of Raymond (from the Old Germanic Reginmund meaning "wise protector"). Ray has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for over a century.