There are some movie stars for whom the frisson of fame and the exultation of performing are usually not sufficient. James Caan, who has died aged 82, sought satisfaction in excessive sports activities, medicine and a vibrant private life. Nonetheless, the various very good portrayals he gave in scores of movies and TV episodes will outlive the gossip and sensational headlines.
His defining function got here as Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). Caan, who was nominated for an Oscar, was good because the hedonistic and unstable inheritor obvious to the Corleone household, whose bloody methods finish in his personal loss of life. The movie, which factors to the hyperlinks between the mafia and American capitalism, portrays males corresponding to Don Corleone (Marlon Brando), the godfather of the title, as businessmen. However Sonny, a remorselessly violent hoodlum pushed by household loyalty, represented the true nature of the Corleone household.
Quickly after The Godfather, Caan was wallowing in violence once more because the embittered hero of Rollerball (1975). Though offered because the ethical centre of the movie, Caan’s character, Jonathan E, is as sadistic as everybody else round him. Extra violence got here his means because the brutal CIA man in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite and, in distinction, he portrayed Billy Rose, the playing, philandering husband of Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice in Humorous Girl, all in the identical 12 months.
Caan was properly teamed with Geneviève Bujold in Claude Lelouch’s romance set within the US, One other Man, One other Likelihood (1977), and with Jane Fonda within the western Comes a Horseman (1978). The latter title chimed with Caan, who was as soon as dubbed the Jewish cowboy due to his earlier participation in rodeos and his possession of a secure of horses.
The movie critic Pauline Kael wrote of Caan at that stage in his profession that “he’s not all of a bit as a performer: he’s by no means fairly himself – you're feeling he’s concealing himself quite than revealing a personality”. He had then just lately emerged from a messy divorce from his second spouse, which can have affected his subsequent performances. In 1981, Caan’s sister Barbara, to whom he was very shut and who ran his manufacturing firm, died of leukaemia, aged 38. “She was my finest buddy, my supervisor,” he mentioned. “She was the one individual I used to be afraid of.” Then he had a bike accident and his home was practically destroyed by a landslide.
There have been a number of flops, undeservedly within the case of Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), launched as Violent Streets within the UK, and deservedly with the whimsical Kiss Me Goodbye (1982) – Caan’s makes an attempt at comedy have been sluggish to be appreciated. His first and final directorial effort, Disguise in Plain Sight (1980), through which he starred as a person in the hunt for his ex-wife and kids, was typically given a cold essential reception. Caan defined that “some jerk at MGM altered the film”.
On high of this, he walked off the set of The Holcroft Covenant (1985) and was changed by Michael Caine. Just a few years earlier, when he was nonetheless bankable, Caan had turned down three Oscar winners, M*A*S*H, Kramer vs Kramer (“it was such middle-class, bourgeois baloney”) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Throughout his fallow interval between 1982 and 1987, he spent his days teaching his son Scott’s soccer and basketball groups, and his nights on the Playboy Mansion (“There have been tons of ladies over there and, name me sick, name me loopy, however I appreciated ’em!”) and taking cocaine. Though he acquired skilled assist and was cured of the habit, he was unemployable in Hollywood.
“I hardly exit,” he advised an interviewer in 1986. “I spend most of my time upstairs in my bed room, carrying out one spot on the mattress the place I sit after I’m making cellphone calls.” When he had not appeared in a movie for 4 years, folks in Hollywood have been starting to ask, “What ever occurred to …?”
Then his buddy Coppola gave him the lead in Gardens of Stone (1987). Discovering a brand new gravitas, Caan was totally convincing as a stiff-necked however compassionate military sergeant who feels that “there may be nothing to win, and no means of profitable it” in Vietnam. Caan’s comeback turned entrenched with a tough function in Rob Reiner’s Distress (1990) – he spends many of the film bedridden and doped as a severely injured author stored captive by his “No 1 fan” (Kathy Bates, who gained the perfect actress Oscar).
However Caan hit the headlines once more within the 90s for the mistaken causes. When his brother Ronnie was held at gunpoint by gangsters, Caan enlisted the assistance of his mafia pal Anthony “the Animal” Fiato. Caan organized to satisfy and pay the abductors, then arrived with Fiato and his crew with weapons and baseball bats. On one other event, the FBI intercepted a cellphone dialog between Fiato and Caan regarding the actor Joe Pesci. Caan requested his buddy to “take care” of Pesci after studying about an unpaid $8,000 invoice from Pesci’s keep at a buddy’s Miami lodge.
When Ronnie Lorenzo, an LA mobster, was arrested for drug trafficking, kidnap and extortion, Caan supplied his house as collateral towards the $2m bail and appeared as a personality witness for his “finest buddy”. Caan was additionally the primary vital movie star to confess to being buddies with the “Hollywood madam” Heidi Fleiss, though he mentioned the connection was platonic.
He was sued by a girl who claimed he had tried to strangle her. (The matter was settled out of courtroom.) Then got here the morning when he awakened in a buddy’s flat to search out 10 Los Angeles policemen standing over him with weapons drawn. Exterior, that they had found a physique of an aspiring actor, Mark Alan Schwartz, on the pavement eight storeys under. Caan was questioned for practically 10 hours earlier than they launched him, having concluded that Schwartz had fallen whereas making an attempt to interrupt into the flat. “It was a nightmare,” Caan mentioned. “I imply, I awakened and this complete factor had occurred whereas I used to be asleep. However it certain appeared actually unhealthy. I appeared responsible.”
Caan survived all this to rebuild his profession. Seldom unemployed, he traded fortunately on his 70s persona, notably enjoying older and wiser variations of Sonny Corleone, both as mafia bosses, louche gamblers or businessmen with mafia connections in movies corresponding to Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Mickey Blue Eyes (1999), with Hugh Grant’s British artwork auctioneer getting blended up with the mob, Metropolis of Ghosts (2002) and Dogville (2003).
Though Caan had all the fitting Italian gestures as Sonny, he was the son of Jewish dad and mom, Sophie (nee Falkenstein) and Arthur Caan, who have been refugees from Nazi Germany. He was born within the Bronx, New York, and raised in Queens, the place his father was a kosher butcher. After attending varied faculties, he entered two universities, Michigan State College, at which he was a soccer hero, and Hofstra College, Lengthy Island, however didn't graduate from both.
Whereas finding out at Hofstra, he turned focused on performing and was quickly taken on by the Neighborhood Playhouse College of the Theatre in New York, the place he studied below Sanford Meisner, whose method was allied to the tactic. One in every of Caan’s fellow college students was Robert Duvall, with whom he was to co-star in The Godfather, in addition to in Robert Altman’s moon-landing drama, Countdown (1967), Coppola’s The Rain Individuals (1969) and The Killer Elite.
Within the early 60s, Caan made his off-Broadway debut in Schnitzler’s La Ronde and began to look on tv, largely as juvenile delinquents, in collection together with Bare Metropolis, Route 66, The Untouchables and Dr Kildare. After an uncredited bit as a sailor with a radio in Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce (1963), he rose to stardom remarkably rapidly.
His first function was as a younger thug terrorising Olivia de Havilland in Girl in a Cage (1964). Powerful insouciance was his model, properly suited to good-looking however quite impassive options. This cool and calculating aspect of Caan’s was exploited by Howard Hawks in two motion pictures, as a daredevil racing driver in Crimson Line 7000 (1965) and because the laid-back “Mississippi”, John Wayne’s gunslinging sidekick in El Dorado (1967).
In The Rain Individuals, the primary of the three movies Caan made with Coppola, a sure vulnerability and heat surfaced as he performed a soft-hearted drifter. He additionally confirmed a young aspect as a naive sailor who falls for a prostitute in Cinderella Liberty (1973) and in Karel Reisz’s The Gambler (1974), through which Caan, intense and sympathetic, offers one in all his best performances as a college professor hooked on playing.
In later years, Caan was content material to have the safety of a well-liked TV collection, Las Vegas (2003-07), showing as a former CIA agent now the pinnacle of safety on the fictional Montecito resort and on line casino. He was additionally prepared to take supporting roles in motion pictures corresponding to Get Sensible (2008), Mercy (2009), which was written by and starred his son Scott, Center Males (2009), The Outsider (2014) and The Good Neighbor (2016). In Carol Morley’s Out of Blue (2018), an adaptation of Martin Amis’s 1997 novel Night time Practice, he was the intimidating father of a murdered astrophysicist daughter, and his film work continued as much as the time of his loss of life.
Caan was divorced 4 occasions. He's survived by a daughter, Tara, from his first marriage, to Dee Jay Mathis; a son, Scott, from his second, to Sheila Ryan; a son, Alexander, from his third marriage, to Ingrid Hajek; and two sons, James and Jacob, from his fourth, to Linda Stokes.
James Edmund Caan, actor, born 26 March 1940; died 6 July 2022
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