James Caan Obituaries Film

His defining role was Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). Caan, who was nominated for an Oscar, was perfect as the hedonistic and unstable heir of the Corleone family, whose bloody ways lead to his own death. The film, which highlights the ties between the mafia and American capitalism, portrays men like Don Corleone (Marlon Brando), the godfather of the title, as businessmen. But Sonny, a ruthlessly violent hoodlum driven by family loyalty, represented the true nature of the Corleone family. Shortly after The Godfather, Caan plunged back into violence as the embittered 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 came his way as the brutal CIA man in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite and, conversely, he portrayed Billy Rose, the gambling, philanthropic husband of Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice in Funny Lady, all in the same year. James Caan, right, with Al Pacino, as brothers Sonny and Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Caan was perfect as the unstable heir to the Corleone family. Photo: Paramount Pictures/Allstar Caan worked well with Geneviève Bujold in Claude Lelouch’s US-set romance Another Man, Another Chance (1977) and with Jane Fonda in the western Comes a Horseman (1978). The latter title was associated with Caan, who was once called the Jewish Cowboy because of his past participation in rodeos and his ownership of a horse stable. Film critic Pauline Kael wrote of Caan at that stage in his career that “he’s not just a piece as a performer: he’s never quite himself – you feel like he’s hiding rather than revealing a character”. He had 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. “He was the only person I was afraid of.” Then he had a motorcycle accident and his house was almost destroyed by a landslide. There were several failures, not justifiably in the case of Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), released as Violent Streets in the UK, and deservedly so with the quirky 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 starred as a man in search of his ex-wife and children, received a generally lukewarm critical reception. Caan explained that “some jolt at MGM changed the film.” In addition, he left the filming of The Holcroft Covenant (1985) and was replaced by Michael Caine. A few years earlier, when he was still in the bank, Caan had turned down three Oscar winners, MAS*H, Kramer vs Kramer (“it was such middle-class, bourgeois baloney”) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. . During the fallow period between 1982 and 1987, he spent his days coaching son Scott’s football and basketball teams, and his nights at the Playboy Mansion (“There were thousands of girls there and, call me sick, call me crazy, but I I liked them!”) and was on cocaine. Although he received professional help and was cured of his addiction, he was unemployed in Hollywood. “I hardly ever go out,” he said in an interview in 1986. “I spend most of my time upstairs in my bedroom, wearing a spot on the bed where I sit when I’m on the phone.” When he hadn’t appeared in a movie for four years, people in Hollywood started asking, “What ever happened to…?” James Caan’s comeback was cemented by his role in Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990), where he spends most of the film bedridden and held by his ‘No 1 fan’, played by Kathy Bates. Photo: Cinetext/Allstar/Columbia Then his friend Coppola gave him the lead in Gardens of Stone (1987). Finding a new gravitas, Caan was thoroughly convincing as a tough but compassionate Army sergeant who feels “there’s nothing to win and no way to win 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 drugged up as a seriously injured writer held captive by his ‘No 1 fan’ (Kathy Bates, Oscar winner best actress). But Caan hit the headlines again in the ’90s for the wrong reasons. When his brother Ronnie is held at gunpoint by gangsters, Caan enlists the help of his mobster friend Anthony “The Animal” Fiato. Kaan arranged to meet and pay the kidnappers, then arrived with Fiat 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 “look after” Pesci after learning of an unpaid $8,000 bill from Pesci’s stay at a friend’s hotel in Miami. When Ronnie Lorenzo, a Los Angeles mobster, was arrested for drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion, Caan offered his home as security for his $2 million bail and acted as a character witness for his “best friend.” Caan was also the first major movie star to admit that he was friends with “Hollywood lady” Heidi Fleiss, although he said the relationship was platonic. He sued a woman who claimed he had tried to strangle her. (The matter was settled out of court.) Then came the morning when he woke up in a friend’s apartment to find 10 LAPD 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. Kaan was questioned for nearly 10 hours before being released after they concluded that Schwartz fell while trying to break into the apartment. “It was a nightmare,” Caan said. “I mean, I woke up and this had all happened while I was sleeping. But it sure looked pretty bad. I looked guilty.” Caan survived all this to rebuild his career. Rarely unemployed, he happily trades in his persona in his 70s, notably playing older and wiser versions of Sonny Corleone, either as mob bosses or as businessmen with mafia connections in films such as Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Mickey Blue Eyes ( 1999) , with Hugh Grant’s British art auctioneer tangling with the mob, City of Ghosts (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 recruited by the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in New York, where he studied under Sanford Meisner, whose technique was allied to method. One of Caan’s fellow students was Robert Duvall, with whom he would co-star in The Godfather, as well as Robert Altman’s moon landing drama Countdown (1967), Coppola’s Rain People (1969) and The elite assassin. James Caan as Billy Rose, the gambling, philanthropic husband of Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Bryce 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 such as Naked City, Route 66, The Untouchables and Dr Kildare. After an unknown part as a radio sailor 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). Cruel obliviousness was his style, suited to handsome but rather emotionless features. This cool and calculating aspect of Caan was exploited by Howard Hawks in two films, as a dashing racing driver in Red Line 7000 (1965) and as the laid-back “Mississippi”, John Wayne’s gun-toting sidekick in El Dorado (1967). In The Rain People, the first of three films Caan made with Coppola, a certain vulnerability and warmth came across as he played a sweet-hearted drifter. He also showed a tender side as a naive sailor who falls in love with a prostitute in Cinderella Liberty (1973) and Karel Reisz’s The Gambler (1974), where Caan, intense and sympathetic, gives one of his best performances as an addicted university professor. in gambling. In later years, Caan was content with the security of a popular TV series, Las Vegas (2003-07), featuring a former CIA agent now head of security at the fictional Montecito resort and casino. He was also willing to play supporting roles in films such as Get Smart (2008), Mercy (2009), which his son Scott wrote and starred in, Middle Men (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 Train, he was the bullying father of a murdered astrophysicist’s daughter, and his film continued until his death. Caan was divorced four times. He is 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 Hayek; and two sons, James and Jacob, from his fourth, to Linda…