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Born
December 18, 1954 · Newark, New Jersey, USA

Died
May 26, 2022 · Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (heart and respiratory complications)

Birth name
Raymond Allen Liotta

QUOTES:

Something Wild (1986) was my first movie. I was in an acting class and on a soap opera for three-and-a-half years in New York – I moved to L.A. at 25 and nothing was really going on for like a five-year period. I was still in acting class, I was in class all through Goodfellas (1990) actually, and I talked to some of the guys and they said, “Are you up for this movie, Something Wild?” and I said, “No.” But I decided I really wanted to be up for it even though [Jonathan] Demme had already narrowed it down to three people. I’d been to college with Melanie Griffith’s then-husband Steven Bauer and I called her up and said, “y’know, can you get me in and I felt weird about it, but here I am, thirty years old and I haven’t done anything yet and I’d read the script and felt like I could do that as well as anyone out there so why not me?” She got me in, she insisted that Jonathan see me, and it just worked out with me.

“Nothing. It’s just make-believe. I don’t think it’s good to personalize it. If you do, it’s limiting. The actors that do personalize it are the ones that always seem the same in every movie they do. I don’t really look at it in any kind of deep psychological way that I learn something about myself. Aside from taking up the acting challenges, I’m really glad I took on the challenge of playing Sinatra, as scary as it was. I learned somewhat about myself – that I could do it and I knew what was bothering me – the fears that I had.” – On what he learns about himself through the characters he plays.

I wasn’t crazy about the way things were going. I wanted to be a little more proactive with my career instead of waiting for something to come to me, so I formed a production company with my wife [Michelle Grace] and a partner, Diane Nabatoff, and changed agents – I really just wanted to clean house and start fresh. The first script I got was Narc (2002) and I really responded to it; it reminded me of a 70s type movie, I really liked the characters, I didn’t anticipate the ending. I wanted to go that way and really get proactive with my career – take some control in it and redirect it in a direction that I liked.