Actors With Questionable Final Roles That They Didn't Foresee Ending Their Careers On

When it comes to leaving behind a lasting legacy, actors are in a precarious position. After all, there's no way of telling which of their roles will be remembered forever — and which of them could tarnish their great reputations. Take these actors, for example. If they had known that the following movies and TV shows would be their final performances ever, would they have held out for something a little, well, better?

Ray Liotta

Goodfellas star Ray Liotta passed away unexpectedly in May 2022 at the age of just 67. He will forever be known for his iconic performance in Martin Scorsese's gangster classic Goodfellas, but Liotta insisted that he's nothing like his hard-as-nails characters. "I have never been in a fight at all," he told People magazine in 2021. And while one final movie role still involved his character getting on the wrong side of the law, it's perhaps not a film you'd usually associate with Liotta.

Final role: Cocaine Bear

There's no prize for guessing what a movie called Cocaine Bear is about — it's all there in the title! But critics were decidedly mixed on the finished film. Reviews website Rotten Tomatoes claimed that the pundits thought Cocaine Bear has a "half-baked plot and uneven acting" but is still fun for "B-movie enthusiasts." Whatever the result, though, director Elizabeth Banks told People Liotta "just came so joyfully into it the whole time." And we will see Liotta on film again, as he had multiple projects in the pipeline at the time of his death.

Orson Welles

Orson Welles has cinematic masterpieces such as Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, and The Third Man to his name. He successfully adapted Shakespeare multiple times and even gripped America with a radio play of War of the Worlds. So you'd perhaps expect his last movie role to be something for the ages. Unfortunately for Welles, though, he went out with an on-screen whimper instead of a bang.

Final role: Transformers: The Movie

The last role Welles performed before his death in 1985 was the voice of Unicron in Transformers: The Movie. According to autobiographer Barbara Leaming, he referred to the paycheck job as "playing a toy." The animated flick was a flop at the time, but it does have something of a cult following these days. Interestingly, the final directorial effort from Welles to be released is The Other Side of the Wind. That came out in 2018: 33 years after he passed away.