American actor Ray Liotta, one of the stars of the legendary mafia film Freedmen, of Martin Scorsese, died at the age of 67, while filming in the Dominican Republic, announced Thursday, May 27 the authorities of this Caribbean country.
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The star is dead ” in his sleep “ on the night of Wednesday May 26 to Thursday May 27, confirmed to the press his agent Jennifer Allen, who gave no further details. “He was in the company of his wife, who asks you to respect his pain”said a spokesperson for the Directorate General of Cinema of the Dominican Republic, adding that Ray Liotta was working on the spot on a feature film titled Dangerous Waters at the time of his sudden death.
Alongside Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci
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 Freedmen (Goodfellasoriginal title) in 1990.
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The actor of the film (who is also its narrator) bursts the screen alongside Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci, in what is considered by moviegoers as one of the greatest films of the genre in the XXe century, with the trilogy of Godfather by Francis Ford Copolla.
In 1991, the movie Freedmen had won an Oscar (Joe Pesci, best supporting role) and had been 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 to himself “very saddened” by the disappearance of Ray Liotta, “far too young to leave us”.
abandoned child
His on-screen wife in FreedmenLorraine Bracco, said on Twitter “completely shattered by the announcement 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 Thursday unearthed 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 6 months. Reuniting with his birth mother years later, the actor said: “I realized that she had done it for very good reasons and that in 99% of adoption cases, it is for the good of the children. »
TV debut
A graduate in music from the University of Miami, he began his career in the late 1970s and early 1980s in a soap opera before appearing in TV series. He really made himself known to the American public by playing in the baseball movie Until the end of the dream in 1989 alongside Kevin Costner and, in 1986, in Dangerous in all respects with Melanie Griffith, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
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For one of her last screen appearances in 2021, Liotta starred in the film Many Saints Of Newark, A History Of The Sopranoswhich retraces the youthful years of the famous mobster Tony Soprano.