In a scene straight out of the kind of mobster movie he might star in, actor Ray Liotta once had a horse’s head delivered to him.
While having an otherwise genial chat with Jay Leno on his car talk show on CNBC, “Jay Leno’s Garage,” Liotta brought up the odd tale, er, head.
As Yahoo reported, Liotta starred as Frank Sinatra in the 1998 HBO made-for-TV movie, “The Rat Pack,” about the famous Vegas boys club of the 1960s that also included Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Peter Lawford.
Well, it seems a few years earlier, Sinatra’s daughters, Nancy and Tina, offered the same role to Liotta for a made-for-TV miniseries they were planning.
“The daughters, they wanted me to do a mini-series when they were doing a mini-series about it,” Liotta explained, “and I just felt too uncomfortable.”
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Once he later agreed to do the HBO film, Liotta got truly uncomfortable when a horse’s head showed up in his mail one day -- sent by the Sinatra sisters.
Anyone who has seen “The Godfather” knows that getting a horse’s head sent to you means certain doom. But it was all in good fun.
“We were doing the movie and I got delivered a horse's head,” Liotta recalled. “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.”
The head and the threat were of course fake.
Liotta explains, “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 recently waded back into gangster movie territory with a starring role in “The Many Saints of Newark,” a “Sopranos” prequel film that is rumored to be picked up as a series by HBO.
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