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before filming Goodfellas and listening
to FBI tapes of Hill’s conversations with
other mobsters. At the same time he
never regarded his craft with much rev-
erence. “Anyone can act,” he told The
Guardian. “It’s a children’s game played
on a child’s level but with adult rules.”
He loved working with Scorsese. “He
just sets up an atmosphere where you
feel you can do anything and you know
he’s going to catch you.” Yet during film-
ing, his adoptive mother, Mary, was dy-
ing of cancer. Preoccupied and then
grief-stricken, he failed to break into
the clique that surrounded the director
and his great friend Robert De Niro (“I
idolised him but he could not have
cared less”). Liotta’s reward for Good-
fellas was regular work in Hollywood
for the rest of his life, although high--
profile roles tended to focus on the edgy
psychopath stereotype. By the time ofhis death he had made more than 80
films.
Above all, he struggled to come to
terms with his adoption. “It has affected
me since I was a little kid,” he said. In his
forties he hired a private detective who
traced his birth mother, but there wasno epiphany: “When I asked about my
dad, she wouldn’t even talk about it. It
was like it never even happened.”
Raymond Julian Vicimarli was born
in 1954 in Newark, New Jersey. He was
abandoned by his biological mother
outside an orphanage. Aged six months
he was adopted by Alfred Liotta, a localHe loved working with
Scorsese but failed
to break into his clique
Andy Fletcher
Keyboardist for Depeche Mode, one of the most
influential and edgy bands of the 1980s and ’90s
When Andy Fletcher was growing up in
Basildon, nobody would have marked
him down as a future rock star. He was
a born-again Christian who went to
church every Sunday, was a member of
the Boy’s Brigade, played chess and al-
ways handed in his homework on time.
Even after he was inspired to form a
band by the punk explosion of 1977, it
was hardly an act of feral teenage insur-
rection, as the group that was to
become Depeche Mode began life
rehearsing in a local church. “The vicar
used to let us have the place. You just
had to be nice and polite and you
weren’t allowed to play too loud,” Dave
Gahan, the band’s lead singer, recalled.
When the group eventually made a
demo tape, they hawked it around
record company offices in person and
asked them to listen while they waited.
When they were told “no, just leave the
tape with us”, the band replied that they
couldn’t; it was the only copy. They
turned up to early gigs on trains, carry-
ing their portable synthesizers under
their arms and plugging them directly
into the venue’s PA system. Once they
had a record deal, their first appearance
on Top Of The Pops in 1981 was a disas-
ter, standing awkwardly behind their
synths as they followed Legs & Co
dancing to Michael Jackson’s latest hit,
and the presenter Simon Bates strug-
gled with his French as he introduced
them as “De-pesh-ay Mode”.
Yet the sound they made was drama-
tic, different, innovative, and it made
them pioneers of the synth-pop, new
wave and electronic music movements,
filling stadiums around the world and
selling an estimated 100 million
records. Fletcher called them “the big-
gest cult band in the world” because
they did all this without ever quite be-
coming mainstream or attracting muchattention from the paparazzi and tab-
loid media.
What marked them out from their
peers was that while most electronic
acts traded in existential gloom and
doom, Depeche Mode dealt in pop
songs you could dance to. Although
their music and lyrics later took on a
darker, gothic tone, Fletcher personally
remained “eternally loyal to the simple
pop melodies and the lightness they
stand for”.
Depeche Mode scored Top Ten hit
singles with songs such as Enjoy the
Silence, Just Can’t Get Enough, Every-
thing Counts and Personal Jesus and
every one of their 14 albums went into
the Top Ten, including Songs Of Faith
and Devotion and Ultra, both of which
went to No 1 in the mid-1990s, the peak
of their commercial success. They were
also one of the few British electronic
bands to stake a presence in the Amer-
ican charts.
Fletcher’s role was somewhat ambig-
uous. In an early incarnation of the
band he played bass but by the time
Depeche Mode hit their stride he had
positioned himself behind an array of
synths, samplers and sequencers.
“There is this big misunderstandingwas pertinent. One reviewer described
his presence on stage as resembling “a
middle manager whooping it up at a
sales conference”.
Even after the photographer and
film-maker Anton Corbijn took charge
of the band’s visual image with a series
of striking videos and album covers,
Fletcher managed to remain largely
anonymous and boasted proudly that
he could walk into any bar in the world
without anyone recognising him. Awaythat in guitar bands real men are work-
ing real instruments while in a synthe-
sizer band like Depeche Mode nobody
works, because it’s all machines. But
that’s bullshit,” he said.
“Apart from the singer, the contribu-
tion of each individual remains invis-
ible. And because I don’t push myself to
the fore, many mistake me for the fifth
wheel.” With Gahan serving as the
band’s frontman and Martin Gore as
the main songwriter, Fletcher was
asked in DA Pennebaker’s 1989 docu-
mentary film about the band, 101 , to
define their individual roles. “Martin’s
the songwriter, Dave’s the vocalist, and
I bum around,” he said.
He was being self-deprecating about
his musical contribution and he also
had a significant role off stage, taking
charge of much of the group’s business
affairs. He was, he said, “the tall guy in
the background, without whom
Depeche Mode would never work”.
Comparing the group to a business
corporation, he suggested that he was
one of those “that do a good job in the
background and don’t get as much
attention as the ones who’d get on to
the microphone and announce the
good quarterly figures”. The analogyFletcher, far
right, in 1987
with his
bandmates,
from right,
Alan Wilder,
Martin Gore
and Dave
GahanLiotta with Robert De Niro in Goodfellas (1990); right, in Something Wild (1986);ters like a child until he realises it’s a
test, tells Pesci to “get the f*** out of
here” and the whole “wiseguy” scene
returns to its easy fellowship as Pesci
starts to bully someone else.
Henry Hill is implicated in the mur-
derous bloody violence that abounds,
but Liotta’s portrayal never loses the
sympathy of men who wanted to be him
and women who wanted to sleep with
him, or mother him. “The thing about
that movie, you know, Henry Hill isn’t
that edgy of a character,” said Liotta in
his croaky New Jersey drawl. “It’s really
the other guys who are doing all the
actual killings.”
Goodfellas became an instant classic
and by the end of 1990 newspapers and
magazines across the world were ask-
ing: “Who is Ray Liotta?” In person he
exuded his noirish screen presence,
inspiring Esquire magazine in 2016 to
describe “the voice that cracks the air
like a whip, the glare that seems to grab
you by the throat as you ask him a ques-
tion. He is a man with that rare quality
of being intense even as he’s being
friendly.”
Yet Liotta was an unpretentious man
who said he felt like “damaged goods”
after finding out he had been adopted
as a baby. He admitted to being social-
ly awkward (“I suck in chat shows”)
and owned odd traits such as a high-
pitched laugh that shook his whole
body, prompting one profiler to
compare him to a ventril-
oquist’s dummy. He
hated watching him-
self on screen and
would often ask inter-
viewers about their
life to deflect atten-
tion.
As an actor he
researched parts
diligently, spend-
ing time with the
real Henry HillRay Liotta fixed Martin Scorsese with
his trademark penetrating stare and
tried to talk his way through a phalanx
of security guards surrounding the film
director.
As the story goes, Scorsese was at the
Venice Film Festival promoting his
controversial film The Last Temptation
of Christ. Liotta had made a moderate
reputation in Hollywood playing “psy-
chopaths”, but the producer Irwin Win-
kler wanted a bigger name for the char-
acter of Henry Hill in Scorsese’s next
film, Goodfellas. Liotta coveted the part
enough to overcome his usual diffi-
dence. Scorsese motioned to his secur-
ity to let the actor through and looked
intently into the piercing, cobalt-blue
eyes beseeching him and observed the
pockmarked cheeks that dimpled boy-
ishly. The famous opening line of his
1990 mob classic would be “Ever since I
can remember I always wanted to be a
gangster.. .”. Now he was faced with the
intensity of a desperate actor who, with
the same single-mindedness, wanted to
say those lines. Liotta got the part.
In the film, which is based on a true
story, Liotta portrays Hill, who as a boy
is drawn to “running numbers” and sell-
ing contraband for the resident crime
family in his Brooklyn neighbourhood.
He is seduced by the cockiness and
glamour that comes with hanging out
with mafia “wiseguys”, double-parking
his car, playing cards on the street all
night and basically doing whatever he
wants because everyone in author-
ity has been paid off. As the film
unfolds, he becomes simpatico
with the mob, playing a key role
in a lucrative airport heist in
- He later spends time in pris-
on where he starts dealing narcot-
ics against the code of the crime
family protecting him. He gets ad-
dicted to cocaine and after a $6
million robbery in 1978 the police
net starts to close. The films ends in
1980 with the paranoid Hill, high on
cocaine and Valium, delivering drugs
and running guns while FBI helicopters
swirl above. All the while, to the head-
splitting soundtrack of the Rolling
Stones, he is juggling a demanding mis-
tress, the need to get home in time to
cook a traditional Italian dinner for his
family and the realisation that his asso-
ciates want him dead. After his arrest he
turns informer and the film draws to a
close in court, with Liotta facing his
former friends in the dock. He details
the gangster life, before looking into the
camera and declaring: “And now it’s all
over.”
Liotta’s character never loses the vul-
nerability of being an outsider, exem-
plified by an improvised scene in which
he laughs hysterically at a joke cracked
by the mobster Tommy DeVito, played
with masterful comic menace by Joe
Pesci, and declares: “You’re a funny
guy!” Silence descends on the restau-
rant as Tommy challenges him: “Funny
how?... Like I’m a clown here to f***ing
amuse you?” The young gangster’s
“street smarts” desert him as he splut-Obituaries
Ray Liotta
Hollywood actor who excelled in the Scorsese mob classic Goodfellas and
was prolific thereafter, but struggled to come to terms with being adopted