Ray Liotta once described himself as the nicest person in the world;

his many fans and admirers will probably remember him as the opposite, as one of the most dangerous and sinister men to populate American cinema in recent decades - and perhaps that describes the genius of the actor Liotta to some extent: that he in his best moments, his best films, was both at the same time.

A friendly man who could smile at you irrefutably peacefully.

And yet you thought you could see and feel that the friendliness could be over from one moment to the next.

Or an evil and violent man, but behind whose frightening presence one seemed to see the lost soul, the weak human being,

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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With the nicest person in the world, Liotta meant his first significant role, Joey Perrini in the television series "Another World", a young man who actually looked in every scene as if he had been freshly washed, extensively blow-dried and absolutely harmless.

Only the lasciviousness with which the costume designer dictated the tightest trousers for him and the camera looked at him from behind in detail indicated that things would not go on like this for long.

It was the director Jonathan Demme, a student of the B-movie master and horror expert Roger Corman and who had just arrived in the mainstream himself, who gave Ray Liotta his first major cinema role: "Something Wild" was the name of the film, which at first was so colourful, trendy and sexy as the 80's would have liked it to be.

Only then, out of the shadows of a misunderstood past, emerges Ray Liotta, a wild and cruel man who doesn't want his former girlfriend to love a now big-city career aspirant.

What the film boils down to is, on the one hand, the couple's fight, staged physically, directly and without symbolic frills, against the man who wants to destroy them both.

And at the same time, Liotta demonstrates that he has the strength and courage

to conjure up all the evil spirits of America and to scorn and deny all American promises of happiness.

He stumbles into a knife in the showdown at the end, and it's almost like he's grateful for this release from himself.

Beats you can't forget

In "Goodfellas," the mafia epic by Corman-pupil Martin Scorsese, he played Henry Hill, the cocaine dealer, so the leading role - even if Robert De Niro, the even more famous, got the first place in the credits.

Michael Ballhaus, who operated the camera, later reported that he was completely exhausted almost every night from the violence in this film.

For example, he meant the scene where Liotta gets out of a car, walks up a driveway, baseball bat in hand.

And then the preppie who molested his girlfriend gets a few punches he won't forget.

There is no cut in this scene, adding to the cruelty.

Ray Liotta was a man of uncertain origins, raised by adoptive parents of Italian descent, always aware that he was not their biological son, long looking for the real parents - and when he found his mother in 2000 and learned from her that if he had Scottish ancestors, that was of little help to him.

He had grown up lacking all the certainties of tradition and pedigree.

He was doomed to be free, doomed to invent himself - and on screen you could see him pouring that experience into his acting, into almost every role he played.

He had inherited the blue eyes;

but the piercing gaze and even more so the resolutely pressed lips, the quick and at the same time very controlled movements - all this seemed to testify to the will with which Ray Liotta claimed to be Ray Liotta, an outsider, to whom the cowboy boots, the leather jackets and the skimpy T-shirts always fitted better than the button-down shirts and establishment loafers.

"Ever since I could remember, I wanted to be a gangster," says Henry Hill in "Goodfellas", another boy who has to invent himself as an Italian and mafioso.

It took a little longer for Liotta;

he kept telling me that he ended up in the acting class at his college by accident: but there, it seems, he realized pretty quickly

He even played Frank Sinatra in a television drama in the late '90s, in which he didn't even bother to look like Sinatra.

Mimicry, Liotta knew, would only have seemed ridiculous;

it was about believing for two hours that Liotta could sing.

Or fly: "Come fly with me!"

Oh, getting older looked good on him, in Noah Baumbach's "Marriage Story" you could see that he didn't become a dignitary even with gray temples.

Raymond Allen Liotta died on Thursday, much too early.

He was 67 years old.