Why did you do that, Ray?

Ray Liotta was the rare actor who peaked early and also peaked late.

The Goodfellas era Liotta was of course a treasure for people in my age bracket, who were just barely old enough to watch a movie like Goodfellas in 1990. That's the first time I was aware of him, though it was his fifth film and he'd had a television career dating back ten years before that. (If we're going for maximum accuracy here, I would have seen him the year before that in Field of Dreams, but since that was a small role that only came in at the end of the movie, it wouldn't have yet been enough to register him in my consciousness as a name I should know.)

Liotta worked steadily after that, making about one film a year, but Goodfellas is a hard place to start out if you are trying to top yourself, as every actor should. But Liotta wasn't really a leading man, even though he is certainly the lead in Goodfellas. He was a character actor sought out largely for sinister roles, even though he is arguably the least sinister character in Goodfellas. His role in Something Wild -- which preceded Goodfellas by four years but which I didn't see until about ten years ago -- is a better measure of how he was seen by casting directors.

But just when Liotta had entered "Remember Ray Liotta?" territory, he started doing some of the best work of his career. The last ten years featured memorable performances like Killing Them Softly, The Place Beyond the Pines, Marriage Story and The Many Saints of Newark. Granted, those films were still playing on the Liotta persona we knew, but they had a lot more depth and nuance than some of the roles he was saddled with right after he became famous. In fact, this post is not the first time I'm tagging Ray Liotta on my blog. I was inspired by his performance in Marriage Story to write this post, which says a lot of things about Liotta that I would want to say today -- so maybe I will let it do some of the work I would otherwise do here. And that performance was not like the typical Liotta performance, as he played a divorce lawyer rather than a mobster.

Liotta died in his sleep while filming a movie in the Dominican Republic. He was 67. He had a lot more to give, seeing as how he had three movies filming and two in post-production. One of those last two was Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear, which is about how it sounds -- it's based on that story of the bear who ate the cocaine. That also gives you an idea how Liotta liked to play off of that persona for comedic purposes, as he did in films like Muppets Most Wanted, Wanderlust, Date Night and a film I probably shouldn't like but do: Wild Hogs. (And I also wrote about him in relation to Wild Hogs, making this actually the third time I've tagged him on my blog.)

He will certainly live on in our minds and in our memes. "Why did you do that, Karen?" is a line I still say quite a bit, alluding to that moment in Goodfellas after his wife, played by Lorraine Bracco, hastily dumps all their cocaine (speaking of cocaine) down the toilet upon baseless fears of discovery. "They would have never found it!"

Why did you do that, Ray? Why did you go and die on us when you still had more peaks yet to come?

Rest in peace.