Ray Liotta, the blue-eyed actor best known for playing mobster Henry Hill in Goodfellas and baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams, has died. He was 67.
Liotta’s publicist, Jen Allen, said he was in the Dominican Republic shooting a new movie and did not wake up on Thursday morning.
Police in the Dominican Republic said they received a call just before 6am at a hotel where Liotta was staying with his fiancee and found the actor dead.
Photo: Reuters
Robert De Niro, who costarred with Liotta in Goodfellas, said in an e-mailed statement that he was saddened by Liotta’s passing.
“He is way too way young to have left us,” De Niro said.
Another Goodfellas star, Lorraine Bracco, who played Henry’s wife, Karen Hill, wrote on Twitter that she could be “anywhere in the world & people will come up & tell me their favorite movie is Goodfellas. Then they always ask what was the best part of making that movie. My response has always been the same...Ray Liotta.”
Liotta was also mourned by Alessandro Nivola, who appeared with him in The Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark.
Nivola called him “dangerous, unpredictable, hilarious and generous with his praise for other actors.”
The Newark, New Jersey, native was born in 1954 and adopted at age six months out of an orphanage by a township clerk and an auto parts owner.
Liotta said he always assumed he was mostly Italian — the movies did, too — but later in life while searching for his birth parents, discovered he was actually Scottish.
At the University of Miami he studied drama and acting, because he said they had no math requirement for enrollment. He would often say in interviews that he only started auditioning for plays because a pretty girl told him to.
His memorable role of the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams moved many to tears, but was not without its critics.
Liotta remembered hearing a baseball announcer during a Mets game complain that he batted the opposite way Joe Jackson did.
“Fuck you. He didn’t come back from the dead either,” Liotta recalled thinking.
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