A lead actor with piercing blue eyes, pockmarked skin, and a wicked laugh, who gives the overall impression of a 1950s doo-wop singer crossed with a psychopath, Joe began his career on the NBC daytime soap "Another World" and demonstrated his versatility playing such roles as a violent ex-convict ("Something Wild" 1986), a medical student caring for his brain-damaged brother ("Dominick and Eugene" 1988) and back-from-the-dead baseball great 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson ("Field of Dreams" 1989). In Jonathan Demme's "Something Wild", Liotta switched genres as radically as the film does, metamorphosing from cutely sinister to an unstoppable force of nature whose violence was more directly, individually physical than that of most gun-toting action heroes.
This scary piece of work jump-started Liotta's career. His range and presence in a limited role presaged his commanding performance in Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas" (1990), as a brutal yet sympathetic mobster destined by his Irish heritage to remain on the fringes of the "organization". Later, Liotta displayed a softer edge as a heart surgeon who leads a revolt against the Washington bureaucracy at a veterans' hospital in "Article 99" (1992) but went back to his old psycho ways in the bad-cop thriller, "Unlawful Entry" (1992). He followed with performances as a testosterone-laden inmate of a futuristic penal colony in "No Escape" (1994), a by-the-book captain who must replace a Vietnamese village's elephant in Disney's "Operation Dumbo Drop" (1995) and an alcoholic medical examiner in the very forgettable "Unforgettable" (1996).
It is ironic that a guy who appeared mostly in musicals in college and "played the nicest guy in the world--never fought, nice to his mother, wasn't one of those fool-arounds"--on "Another World" has made his mark as a man of menace. His quieter work in movies like "Dominick and Eugene" and "Corrina, Corrina" (1994), as a widower who hires Whoopi Goldberg to help him take care of his daughter, has not captured the public's fancy.
He returned to familiar terrain as the nutzoid serial killer of "Turbulence" and earned particular praise for his performance as a police officer who wrestles with his conscience in "Cop Land" (both 1997) before aligning himself with the right side of the law represented by Sheriff Sylvester Stallone He once again played a crooked cop seeking redemption in "Phoenix" (1998), but the HBO movie "Rat Pack" (1998) afforded him the opportunity to explore other aspects of his character as legendary crooner Frank Sinatra.