Frank Sinatra’s daughters sent Ray Liotta a fake horse’s head after he declined to play their father, the actor has claimed.
The Goodfellas star made the comments during an appearance on Wednesday’s episode (3 November) of Jay Leno’s Garage.
Liotta said that he was sent the strange package by Nancy and Tina Sinatra after he declined their request that he play their father in a TV miniseries they were making.
“The daughters, they wanted me to do a miniseries when they were doing a miniseries about it and I just felt too uncomfortable,” recalled the actor.
Liotta went on to star as Sinatra in the 1998 film The Rat Pack opposite Don Cheadle, Joe Mantegna and Angus Macfadyen.
The 66-year-old said that Tina and Nancy sent him a fake horse’s head when they found out he had agreed to The Rat Pack after having turned them down.
“We were doing the movie and I got delivered a horse’s head,” said Liotta. “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 gift is an homage to a scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s crime drama The Godfather, in which a severed horse’s head is sent as a threat to Jack Woltz (played by John Marley) after he refuses a request from the Corleone family.
Liotta continued: “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?’”
The Independent has contacted a representative of Nancy and Tina Sinatra for comment.
