Ray liotta parents, Ray Liotta is staring out of the window, his steely eyes looking at the grey Thames. His feet, Puma-clad, are on the coffee table. He is wearing shapeless jeans and an uncomfortable half-smile. He is nervous, suspicious, unsure. Despite 20-odd years in the movies, he is not comfortable promoting them. He wonders if it is a necessary evil.
He seems bemused that the movie Wild Hogs, about men navigating their middle-age crises with a road trip on Harleys, has become such a phenomenal success. He plays the leader of a Hells Angels pack that gets into various scrapes with the Wild Hogs "gang" of John Travolta, Tim Allen, William H Macy and Martin Lawrence.
Many might share his bemusement. This is an unlikely success story, but success story it is. It's Disney's biggest ever March opening in the US. One of the biggest comedies of the year. And John Travolta's biggest ever opening.
Liotta is best known, of course, for the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas, in which he plays the mafioso Henry Hill. He has played an awful lot of bad guys and outsiders over the years - and here he is doing it again. Did he have fun making this movie, I ask him, although he looks so glum it seems like it's a very long time since he had any fun at all.
"Yeah, I did," he says, brightening up. "It's another bad guy, but it's a comedy and I've never ridden a motorcycle before, and that seemed appealing. They were nice enough to give us Harleys as wrap gifts, so I'll ride it once in a while up in my neighbourhood where it's nice and quiet and there's not much traffic, so you don't have to go fast. I'm not a speed demon."
Liotta is always telling people he hasn't been in a fight since seventh grade, but no one believes him. How did this quiet, measured man end up with such a fearsome image?
He started off in the American soap Another World, then took a little road trip from New York to LA, where his friend Steven Bauer, who was married to Melanie Griffith at the time, got him the part as her psychotic ex-boyfriend in Something Wild. He's done lots of bad guys and sad guys since, as well as having bits of his brain sauteed by Anthony Hopkins in the film Hannibal.
His performance in Goodfellas is widely admired - one of the best non-Oscar-winning moments ever. And he can be searingly good. In person or on screen, he can create an atmosphere of tension or super-sweetness just with a look in his eyes. And what eyes. Steel blue, hard, hot, warm - all of these things in an instant. Sometimes he'll be staring out of that window avoiding eye contact. Then he'll pin you. And somehow when his eyes search you he strips himself.
Did he expect this movie to do so well? "No idea," he says. "I stopped predicting or having expectations. I remember early in my career Goodfellas didn't open big. And I've been part of really big openings, such as Hannibal, where you really do have expectations and it doesn't happen. It's really disappointing because our business is not a meritocracy. It doesn't matter how well you do; it's how well the movie does. That predicts what's going to happen with your jobs. The better the movie does, the more offers you get. So I was burned a couple of times, and disappointed ..."
You feel the angry chill of that disappointment, and then quickly a resignation. "Sometimes you see actors making $20m a movie and you say, 'Wait a second. This guy can't act himself out of a paper bag.' But it's just part of the business."
He swivels his head round and reasons that sometimes the business can be unfair and cruel. This time the fact that he is in a No 1 box-office movie means he just got a part in "a really really good movie". "It's with Sean Penn and Harrison Ford. It's called Crossing Over. It's very much in the vein of Traffic and Babel. It involves border control. It's another bad guy." He gives a pained sigh. "It's a really good part, and you know, even if they're bad, you don't condone them but you try to make them human beings."
Liotta is so flawed and vulnerable that he doesn't know how to give a soundbite. That's what makes him good. In Crossing Over he "takes advantage" of a young woman who wants to be an actress and doesn't have a green card. "He uses her for his enjoyment," he says with a look of disgust.
In relationships, is he usually the manipulator or the manipulated? "I hope neither," he says. "Manipulation - that's a strong word. You can be more in control or less in control. And I think it should be give and take. Sometimes one person in control, sometimes the other. It has to be a combination. Probably if I'd found that combination I'd still be in a relationship ..."
Relationships are what Liotta is most interested in talking about. He is more comfortable because it's real. So why do his relationships with women fail? Why did his marriage, to the actor-turned-producer Michelle Grace, end in divorce? Why, three years on, is he still unattached?
"I had a relationship after I got divorced and it didn't feel as equal as I would have liked. I was more vulnerable based on the experience I'd just been through. Everybody brings the dynamics of the previous relationships they were in. It's been a few years now ... Dating, I haven't really gotten into that at all. I've only had one or two dates in the past couple of years. It's either going to happen, or not. I'm hoping that it is."
Liotta is now 51. He didn't get married to Grace until he was 40. He once said, "I tend to do things late. It takes me a long time." At the time he reasoned that by 40 he was ready to put romancing behind him and settle down. He cried when he proposed outside the jewellery shop.
They have a daughter, Karsen, now eight. "My whole life is about her. Being a dad. She'll come up and visit me on set. I don't like to go too long without seeing her. Maybe a couple of weeks. I just had a period of four months at home because I decided not to do a movie so I could spend more time with her. It was all about taking her to dance classes, playing with her."
Did he not enjoy being the husband as much as the father? "It just didn't work out," he says, his lullaby Jersey accent laced with hurt. "I would love to be in a relationship with the right person. That's the key - the right person."
Who would that be? "Probably someone who is not as career-orientated, who is more about the relationship. I talk to my friends and, you know, they all seem to get relationships that aren't right. You kind of want someone who is not at your beck and call but loves the idea of being in a relationship and what that entails. Being there for you."
And Grace? Was she too busy producing, acting? "She was producing, yeah. She's a great woman, and thank God we're still friends. She still stays over at the house, so Karsen can see us together. You want to give her as much semblance of a family unit as you can when you're separated or divorced."
The guys in Wild Hogs seem to be having the male menopause. Has he had that? "Not really. I think I had a kind of pause for insight in my 20s when I wasn't in a relationship and my career wasn't going the way I wanted it to go. I had time for reflection then. And then there was another point when the marriage broke up. It was actually more her doing it, but I obviously agreed that it was the better thing to do. But you know, the reality is you're ageing. The birthdays get higher and higher up and you realise there's less and less time. When you're in your 20s and 30s you think it's all going on for ever. And when you get in your 40s and 50s you realise, hey, you're lucky if you get to 80 or 90. So there's a reality in the passage of time and you are, shit, probably halfway through. It keeps you up a little at night." He's clearly in pain.
"I don't drink any more, but when I used to get hangovers or be tired it makes you more vulnerable." Vulnerability is something that Liotta specialises in. The way he expresses fear, for instance, is so intense and so all-consuming he becomes emotionally fearless. When he gets in these panics about the passage of time, does he worry that he hasn't told someone how much he loves them?
"No. I've done all that. Maybe that's the actor in me. I'm emotionally in tune with my feelings and what people mean to me and I have no trouble saying it and relating to it."
As a baby, he was adopted by an Italian father and Scottish mother. Nice people. For years he tried not to wonder about his real mother until he had a child and wanted to know what she might be likely to inherit. He tracked her down and found that she'd had him when she was very young and couldn't cope. He was "disappointed. I was really grateful that I was adopted."
When his birth-mother realised who the son she had given up was, he says, "She had a whole different bounce to her voice."
The last time we met, Liotta went on a profound and unstoppable monologue about how when he first came to LA he had a relationship with a woman called Heidi, a former stunt woman who was a quadriplegic. They met through Melanie Griffith. He told me, "We went to the movies, did everything like a regular girlfriend-boyfriend relationship - physically, sexually, everything. She just happened to be a quad. After a year it starts wearing on you. At first I hoped she'd get better. It was an intense relationship. It took so much out of me I was compromising the work part. I realised that to succeed in the dream I had to break away." I don't think he walked away easily.
"I feel I've done everything late in life," he says now. "Got married late and I didn't do my first movie until I was 31. But in this crazy business you never know what's going to happen. Maybe after 20 years of making movies I'll become an overnight sensation. Maybe I'm due."
There is no doubt about that. "Back in 1991," he says, "I was picky about what I would do. But you can't just sit around and wait for the perfect ones to turn up. You try to make the best choices that you can, but I was turning down lots of things. I picked a movie [Article 99] where I played a heart surgeon and then the studio was going bankrupt. It was a well-made movie. It was just as good as some of these others that became successful, but you know, for some reason it was just not my time."
Does he feel at home in the movie business? "I don't feel like I'm one of the guys," he says. "Even when I'm with these guys [ Travolta et al] I feel I'm more quiet and let them take centre stage. My personality is more mellow. I don't need to be the centre of attention. I don't know if that's being an outsider or not."
He once said, "If you want to know me, just ask me about my dog." So?
"I have shar peis."
The Chinese wrinkly ones. I hear they are very high-maintenance.
"No, not at all," he says, offended. "Because of their pure-bred nature they are often ill. They're sweet dogs."
Weren't they originally bred as fighter dogs?
"Thousands of years ago. Mine aren't fighters - they're just lovers. They're emotional, kind and protective."
So they are like you?
"I'm not sick a lot and I don't have really saggy skin. I think you have to be careful with that one," he says, offended, and I'm not sure if it's mock.
