American actor Ray Liotta, best known for his breakout role as mobster Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese's “Goodfellas,” has died at the age of 67 in the Dominican Republic.
A source at the Dominican Republic’s National Forensic Science Institute who was not authorized to speak to the media confirmed Liotta's death and said his body was taken to the Cristo Redentor morgue. The Hollywood Reporter and NBC News cited representatives for Liotta who said he died in his sleep Wednesday night. He was in the Dominican Republic to film a new movie.
The Newark, New Jersey, native was born in 1954 and adopted at 6-months-old out of an orphanage by a township clerk and an auto parts owner. Though he mostly grew up playing sports, including baseball, during his senior year of high school, the drama teacher at the school asked him if he wanted to be in a play, which he agreed to on a lark. And it stuck: He’d go on to study acting at the University of Miami. After graduation, he got his first big break on the soap opera “Another World.”
Liotta’s first big film role was in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” as Melanie Griffith’s character’s hotheaded ex-convict husband Ray. The turn earned him a Golden Globe nomination. A few years later, he would get the memorable role of the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson in “Field of Dreams.”
His most iconic role, as real-life mobster Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” came shortly after. He, and Scorsese, had to fight for it though, with multiple auditions and pleas to the studio to cast the still relative unknown.
