Celebrity

Ray Liotta Faced Threat From Frank Sinatra’s Daughters That Any ‘Godfather’ Fan Could Appreciate

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Ray Liotta might have been too young to star in The Godfather, but he claimed he once lived out one of the film’s most famous scenes thanks to Frank Sinatra’s daughters. In an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, the Many Saints of Newark star said Nancy Sinatra and Tina Sinatra once sent him a horse’s head when he was making the HBO movie The Rat Pack in 1998. Liotta earned a Screen Actors Guild award nomination for playing Ol’ Blue Eyes in the movie.

Liotta told Leno the horse’s head was meant as a warning, just as it was in The Godfather. They were not happy with him making The Rat Pack while they were developing their own miniseries they wanted him for. “The daughters, they wanted me to do a miniseries when they were doing a miniseries about it and I just felt too uncomfortable,” Liotta, 66, recalled, reports the New York Post. “We were doing the movie and I got delivered a horse’s head… Obviously, it wasn’t a real one, but it was a horse’s head. And, you know, a horse’s head means you’re toast.”

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“It turned out that his daughters sent it and said, ‘Oh, you could do this one, but you couldn’t do the one that we wanted you to?’” Liotta said. Nancy, 81, and Tina, 73, never did make their own miniseries about the Chairman of the Board. However, they were involved in the making of the 2015 documentaryย Sinatra: All or Nothing at All.

Liotta can now be seen in theaters in The Sopranos prequel movie The Many Saints of Newark and is now working on Cocaine Bear. The Goodfellas star actually has two roles in Many Saints, playing the twin brothers “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti and Salvatore “Sally” Moltisanti. “It was fun, and it happened out of the blue,” Liotta told PopCulture.comย in a recent interview about his role in the movie. “[Sopranos series creator] David [Chase] just one day came up to me and said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ I said, ‘Whoa, yeah, let me take this on. This’ll be a fun little challenge.”

Although Liotta is best known for his roles in mob and crime movies, he told the New York Post in October he’s definitely not like that in real life. “I don’t go around beating people up,” Liotta said at the time. “I’ve never been in a fight. I avoid it at all costs.”

Liotta also said he never watched The Sopranos too much, even though he came close to appearing in the show. Even after reading the Many Saints script, he still didn’t feel the need to rush through the HBO series. “It was all in the script,” he said. “Because I didn’t watch the series, I didn’t feel like I really missed a lot of the stuff because I didn’t know what they were talking about. This movie stands alone.”ย