![]() Liotta has one daughter, Karsen, with ex-wife Michelle Grace and was engaged to be married to Jacy Nittolo at the time of his death. ![]() His only regret, he once told the Los Angeles Times, was turning down a meeting to talk to Tim Burton about starring in “Batman.” For gamers, he’s immortalized as the voice of Tommy Vercetti in the video game “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.” He also starred opposite Jennifer Lopez in the series “Shades of Blue.” He got to be a victim of Hannibal Lecter in the 2001 film “Hannibal” and played Frank Sinatra in the TV movie “The Rat Pack,” which got him a Screen Actors Guild nomination. Liotta also often played various law enforcement types, from cops and detectives to federal agents in films as diverse as “Unlawful Entry,” “Cop Land,” “Narc,” “The Place Beyond the Pines” and “Observe and Report.” Many were corrupt. “But I was and luckily it all worked out.” “I’m really not sure what made me so determined,” he told The Guardian last year. But he’d still end up playing a mob type with James Gandolfini in Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly.” And later, he would pay his own ticket to audition for “The Many Saints of Newark.” He turned down the part of Ralphie on “The Sopranos” because of it. Mafiosos seemed to be his specialty (he even narrated an AMC docu-series called “The Making of the Mob”), though he was wary of being typecast. It didn’t matter the size of the role, or even the genre, Liotta always managed to stand out and steal scenes in both dramas and comedies, whether as Johnny Depp’s father in “Blow” or Adam Driver’s bullish divorce lawyer in “Marriage Story.” “People watch it over and over, and still respond to it, and different ages come up, even today, teenagers come up to me and they really emotionally connect to it,” he said. When that didn’t work, he “phoned Melanie. In an interview in 1993, he told The Associated Press that he wanted to get the part on his own merits even though he knew Griffith. He was 30 years old at the time and hadn’t had a steady job in five years. It would take a few years for him to land his first big movie role, in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” as Melanie Griffith’s character’s hotheaded ex-convict husband Ray. After graduation, he got an agent and soon he got his first big break on the soap opera “Another World.” He would often say in interviews that he only started auditioning for plays because a pretty girl told him to. And later, at the University of Miami he picked drama and acting because they had no math requirement attached. Whether he knew it or not at the time, it planted a seed, though he still assumed he’d end up working construction. ![]() Though he grew up focused on playing sports, including baseball, during his senior year of high school, the drama teacher asked him if he wanted to be in a play, which he agreed to on a lark. But later in life while searching for his birth parents, he discovered he’s actually Scottish. ![]() Liotta always assumed he was mostly Italian - the movies did too. The Newark, New Jersey, native was born in 1954 and adopted at age six months out of an orphanage by a township clerk and an auto parts owner.
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