There are some movie stars for whom the rub of fame and the thrill of acting is not enough. James Caan, who has died aged 82, sought satisfaction in extreme sports, drugs and a colorful personal life. However, the many superb portrayals he gave in dozens of films and television episodes will outlive the gossip and sensational headlines.
His defining role came as Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). Caan, who was nominated for an Oscar, was perfect as the hedonistic and fickle heir apparent of the Corleone family, whose bloody ways end in his own death. The film, which points out the ties between the Mafia and American capitalism, casts people like Don Corleone (Marlon Brando), the godfather of the title, as businessmen. But Sonny, a ruthlessly violent bully driven by family loyalty, represented the true nature of the Corleone family.
Soon after The Godfather, Caan again wallowed in violence as the bitter hero of Rollerball (1975). Although presented as the moral center of the film, Caan’s character, Jonathan E, is as sadistic as everyone else around him. More violence befell him as the brutal CIA man in Sam Peckinpah’s Assassin’s Elite and, in contrast, he portrayed Billy Rose, the gambling, cheating husband of Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice in Funny Lady, all through the same year.
James Caan, right, with Al Pacino as brothers Sonny and Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Caan was perfect as the fickle heir apparent of the Corleone family. Photo: Paramount Pictures/Allstar
Caan teamed well with Genevieve Bijold in the US-set Claude Lelouch romance Another Man, Another Chance (1977) and with Jane Fonda in the Western Here Comes the Horseman (1978). The latter title coincides with Caan, who was once called the Jewish Cowboy because of his previous involvement in rodeos and his ownership of a stable.
Film critic Pauline Kael wrote of Caan at this stage in his career that “he is not complete as a performer: he is never quite himself – you feel that he is hiding himself rather than revealing character”. He then recently emerged from a messy divorce from his second wife, which may have affected his subsequent performances. In 1981, Caan’s sister Barbara, with whom he was very close and who ran his production company, died of leukemia at the age of 38. “She was my best friend, my manager,” he said. “She was the only person I was afraid of.” Then he has a motorcycle accident and his house is almost destroyed by a landslide.
There were a few flops, undeservedly in the case of Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), released as Violent Streets in the UK, and deservedly so with the whimsical Kiss Me Goodbye (1982), Caan’s attempts at comedy were slow to be appreciated. His first and last directorial effort, Hide in Plain Sight (1980), in which he played a man searching for his ex-wife and children, was generally met with lukewarm critical reception. Caan explained that “some moron at MGM changed the movie.”
He also left the set of The Holcroft Covenant (1985) and was replaced by Michael Caine. A few years earlier, when it was still bankable, Caan had turned down three Oscar winners, M*A*S*H, Kramer vs Kramer (“it was such middle-class, bourgeois nonsense”) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
During his unemployment between 1982 and 1987, he spent his days coaching his son Scott’s football and basketball teams and his nights at the Playboy Mansion (“There were tons of girls there and, call me sick, call me crazy, but I liked them!”) and takes cocaine. Although he received professional help and recovered from his addiction, he was unemployed in Hollywood.
“I hardly ever go out,” he told an interviewer in 1986. “I spend most of my time upstairs in my bedroom, scrubbing the spot on the bed where I sit when I’m on the phone.” When he wasn’t appearing in movie for four years, people in Hollywood are starting to ask, “What happened to…?”
James Caan’s comeback was cemented with his role in Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990), in which he spends most of the film bedridden and held captive by his “number one fan”, played by Kathy Bates. Photo: Cinetext/Allstar/Columbia
Then his friend Coppola gave him the lead role in Stone Gardens (1987). Finding a new gravitas, Caan was thoroughly convincing as a tough but compassionate Army sergeant who feels he has “nothing to gain and no way to gain it” in Vietnam. Caan’s comeback was cemented with a difficult role in Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990)—he spends most of the film bedridden and sedated as a seriously injured writer held captive by his “number one fan” (Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for best actress).
But Caan made headlines again in the 1990s for the wrong reasons. When his brother Ronnie was held at gunpoint by gangsters, Caan enlisted the help of his mobster friend Anthony “The Animal” Fiato. Caan arranged to meet and pay the kidnappers, then arrived with Fiato and his crew with guns and baseball bats. In another case, the FBI intercepted a telephone conversation between Fiato and Caan regarding the actor Joe Pesci. Caan asked his friend to “take care” of Pesci after learning of an unpaid $8,000 bill from Pesci’s stay at a friend’s hotel in Miami.
When Los Angeles mobster Ronnie Lorenzo was arrested for drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion, Caan offered his home as collateral for the $2 million bail and appeared as his “best friend’s” character witness. Caan was also the first major movie star to admit to being friends with “Hollywood madam” Heidi Fleiss, although she said the relationship was platonic.
He was sued by a woman who claimed he tried to strangle her. (The matter was settled out of court.) Then came the morning he woke up in a friend’s apartment to find 10 Los Angeles police officers standing over him with guns drawn. Outside, they had discovered the body of an aspiring actor, Mark Alan Schwartz, on the sidewalk eight stories below. Caan was questioned for nearly 10 hours before being released after they concluded Schwartz had fallen while trying to break into the apartment. “It was a nightmare,” Caan said. “I mean, I woke up and this whole thing happened while I was sleeping. But it sure looked very bad. I looked guilty.”
Caan went through all this to rebuild his career. Rarely out of a job, he happily traded on his 1970s persona, notably playing older and wiser versions of Sonny Corleone, either as mob bosses, gambling gamblers or mob-connected businessmen in films like Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Mickey Blue Eyes (1999), with Hugh Grant’s British art auctioneer who gets involved with the mob, Ghost Town (2002) and Dogville (2003).
Although Caan had all the right Italian gestures as Sonny, he was the son of Jewish parents, Sophie (née Falkenstein) and Arthur Caan, who were refugees from Nazi Germany. He was born in the Bronx, New York, and raised in Queens, where his father was a kosher butcher. After attending various schools, he entered two universities, Michigan State University, where he was a football hero, and Hofstra University, Long Island, but failed to graduate from either.
While studying at Hofstra, he became interested in acting and was soon accepted by the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in New York, where he studied under Sanford Meissner, whose technique was associated with method. One of Caan’s fellow students was Robert Duvall, with whom he was to star in The Godfather, as well as Robert Altman’s moon landing drama Countdown (1967), Coppola’s Rain People (1969) and Assassin’s Creed.
James Caan as Billy Rose, the gambling, adulterous husband of Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice in Funny Lady (1975). Photo: Ronald Grant
In the early 1960s, Caan made his Off-Broadway debut in Schnitzler’s La Ronde and began appearing on television, mostly as juvenile delinquents, in series including Naked City, Route 66, The Untouchables, and Dr. Kildare. After an uncredited role as a sailor with a radio in Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce (1963), he rose to stardom remarkably quickly.
His first role was as a young thug who terrorized Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage (1964). Hard nonchalance was his style, suited to handsome but rather callous features. This cool and calculating trait of Caan’s was used by Howard Hawks in two films, as a daring racing driver in Red Line 7000 (1965) and as the calm “Mississippi”, John Wayne’s gunslinger in El Dorado (1967).
In The Rain People, the first of three films Caan made with Coppola, a certain vulnerability and warmth surfaced as he played a soft-hearted drifter. He also showed a tender side as a naïve sailor who falls in love with a prostitute in Cinderella Liberty (1973) and in Karel Reiss’s The Gambler (1974), in which Caan, intense and likeable, gives one of his best performances as a university professor , addicted to gambling.
In later years, Caan settled for security on a popular television series, Las Vegas (2003-07), appearing as a former CIA agent now head of security at the fictional Montecito Resort and Casino. He was also willing to take on supporting roles in films such as Get Smart (2008), Mercy (2009), which was written by and starred his son Scott, Middle Men (2009), The Outsider (2014) and The Good Neighbor ( 2016). ). In Carroll Morley’s Out of Blue (2018), an adaptation of Martin Amis’s 1997 novel Night Train, he was the frightening father of a murdered astrophysicist daughter, and his film work continued until his death.
Caan was divorced four times. He is survived by his daughter Tara from his first marriage to DJ Mathis; a son, Scott, by his second, to Sheila Ryan; son Alexander from his third marriage to Ingrid Hayek; and two sons, James and Jacob, of his fourth, to Linda…
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