Death of American actor Ray Liotta, star of Scorsese’s “Goodfellas”

American actor Ray Liotta, one of the stars of Martin Scorsese’s legendary mafia film ‘Goodfellas’, has died aged 67 while filming in the Dominican Republic, authorities said on Thursday. of this Caribbean country.

The star died “in her sleep” overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, her agent Jennifer Allen confirmed in a press release, who gave no further details.

“He was in the company of his wife who asks you to respect her pain,” a spokesperson for the Dominican Republic’s directorate general of cinema had previously told AFP, adding that Ray Liotta was working on site on a long-term. footage titled “Dangerous Waters”, at the time of his sudden passing.

– Masterpiece –

Born on December 18, 1954, in Newark, New Jersey, opposite New York, abandoned as a baby in an orphanage, Raymond Allen Liotta became a world star for having camped on the screen the real New York mafia gangster Henry Hill (1943-2012) in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece “Goodfellas” (“Goodfellas”) in 1990.

The film’s actor — who is also its narrator — breaks the screen alongside Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci, in what is considered by moviegoers to be one of the greatest films of the genre in the 20th century. century, with Francis Ford Copolla’s “The Godfather” trilogy.

In 1991, the film “Goodfellas” won an Oscar (Joe Pesci, best supporting role) and was nominated in five other categories. Some of these scenes, sometimes ultraviolent, and the dialogues have entered the world cinematographic culture forever.

The immense American and international star Robert De Niro, 78, paid tribute to him in a press release sent to the media The Hollywood Reporter, saying he was “very saddened” by the disappearance of Liotta, “far too young to leave us”.

– Orphan –

His on-screen wife in Goodfellas, Karen Hill’s character played by Lorraine Bracco, said on Twitter that she was “completely shattered by the news of this terrible news”.

For comedian Jamie Lee Curtis, also on Twitter, “his work as an actor revealed his complexity as a human being”: Ray Liotta was a “gentleman”.

The Washington Post unearthed Thursday a TV archive of the Larry King show in which he spoke in 2014, bluntly, of having been abandoned as a newborn in an orphanage and adopted at the age of six months.

Having reunited with her natural mother years later, “I realized that she had done it for very good reasons and that in 99% of cases of adoptions, it is for the good of the children”, then recognized the actor.

A graduate in music from the University of Miami, he began his career in the late 1970s and early 1980s in a soap opera (“Another World”) before appearing in TV series.

He really made himself known to the American public by playing in the baseball film “Jusqu’au bout du rêve” (“Field of Dreams”) in 1989 alongside Kevin Costner and, in 1986, in “Dangereuse in all respects” ( “Something Wild”) with Melanie Griffith, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

For one of his last screen appearances in 2021, Liotta starred in the film “Many Saints Of Newark – A Sopranos Story”, which traces the youthful years of famous mobster Tony Soprano, from the cult television series eponym.

He had been married from 1997 until their divorce in 2004 to actress Michelle Grace, with whom he had a daughter.

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Death of American actor Ray Liotta, star of Scorsese’s “Goodfellas”