There is a scene in Goodfellas where Henry Hill narrates how the mob ruled their neighborhood, and Ray Liotta’s voice — casual, specific, almost affectionate — makes you believe that this is what power actually smells like from the inside. It was the kind of performance that makes a career. It was also the kind of performance that makes a trap.
He grew up in Union, New Jersey, the son of an Italian-American auto parts dealer and his wife Mary, who had adopted Ray from an orphanage when he was six months old. The biographical irony that surfaced later — after he hired a private detective to locate his biological mother in the early 2000s — was that he had no Italian blood at all.
