Ray Liotta, who died on May 26th, 2022, was a well-known Hollywood actor and producer. Ray stumbled into acting in the late 1970s and was often type cast for playing a lot of violent psychotic characters.
After college, Ray moved to New York City. One of his earliest roles was as Joey Perrini on the soap opera Another World, in which he appeared from 1978 to 1981. In 1990, Ray portrayed real-life mobster Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award winning film “Goodfellas.” In 1992, he starred as a psychopathic cop in the thriller “Unlawful Entry.”
Ray was a lifelong smoker. Just prior to his portrayal of Aldo Montesanti in “The Many Saints of Newark” (a Sopranos prequel) Ray stated for Cigar & Spirits Magazine that among the many cigars he’d smoked, he had really enjoyed the Davidoff Churchill The Late Hour, containing tobacco aged in a whiskey barrel.
In November 2018’s New York Moves Magazine, Ray stated that he decided to give up smoking, when his four year-old daughter told him, [he] stank and stopped for vanity reasons and he wanted to live long [for her].
Later that year, Ray said he revisited his desire to quit smoking because of the control it had over his life but he didn’t know how. He publicly promoted the smoking cessation drug, Chantix, which he claims helped reduce his urges to the point that he could quit… though he was still occasionally seen enjoying a stogie.
Ray died in his sleep at the age of 67 – the cause of his cause of death is not clear. ‘Deadline’ reported on May 26 that Liotta, best known for his role in “Goodfellas” (1990), died in his sleep. “Deadline hears he died in his sleep in the Dominican Republic, where he was shooting the film ‘Dangerous Waters,’” the outlet reported.
Ray Liotta contributed greatly to our generation’s mobster movies and will be missed.
RIP Ray Liotta!