Ray Liotta
Ray Liotta
Raymond Allen "Ray" Liottais an American actor, film producer, and voice actor. He is best known for his portrayals of Henry Hill in the crime-drama Goodfellasand Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams. For his second feature film, Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, Liotta received a Golden Globe nomination and won the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor. He has since become a highly-regarded screen personality, appearing in leading or supporting roles in films such as Unlawful...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth18 December 1954
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
I've only been in one fight in my whole life... in 7th grade, yet everyone thinks I'm a maniac.
There are a lot of actors who will watch the monitors. They'll do a scene, and then the director will look back to see if he got whatever he wanted. I just find it odd to sit there and watch yourself. But if you can be objective, I can see how it's really useful as a tool, especially if you're doing something physical.
The best way to learn anything is through a movie, because you have so much time to do it and you have great people teaching you.
I never, ever wanted to be an actor.
I've done a few movies where I really liked the project, but I wasn't sure about the director, and I still did it and my instinct was right, in the beginning. Even though it was a good story, the guy still didn't really know what he was doing.
The more you think about something, the more important it becomes, the more important it is to you, and the more important it will become to the audience.
With any mannerisms or dialogue, you have to be careful you're not just serving yourself. What happens with improving is a lot of times, if you're not in the framework of the script, you're just making everything easier so it fits you. It's much more interesting and challenging to go to it, rather than it coming to you.
My career has been up and down, and I like it much better being up.
I'm not a proponent of people watching a movie, and then going out and doing something bad. People have been doing bad things, well before movies.
Just by the nature of what we do it kind of gets you out of the regularities of life. Playing pretend for a living is a good way to have a release and playing make believe is a good way of getting away from it and doing things like this. So I think work gets me away from life.
I like to think that even with some of the more intense ones sometimes there is humour in there, you try to make a complete human being, whether the guy is good or bad.
If I think something's funny, I think it's funny.
I would like to do a lot more of it, I feel comfortable with it and basically it's all in the writing. I'm not a personality type actor, I need a good script in order to be funny, but it's definitely something that I like doing.
The Rat Pack was the piece that really kicked me out of that little funk that I was in and then Ted called me up and asked me if I wanted to be the dad in Blow.