JAMES CAAN
(26 March 1940 – 6 July 2022)
James Caan, who has died aged 82, was an American character actor much in demand for cinema and television. After appearing in films by Howard Hawks, Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola during the 1960s, he really came to international attention playing Sonny Corleone in Coppola's The Godfather (1972), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. It was a role he repeated in The Godfather Part II. He went on to make scores of films, often playing characters that were no better than they should be - felons, fighters, fugitives and failures, addictive creatures usually on the wrong side of the law.
Janes Caan was born in the Bronx in New York City to kosher butcher Arthur Caan and his wife Sophie who were Jewish immigrants from Germany. He studied at the Michigan State University and whilst there tried to play in college football but failed to join the team. He transferred to Hofsta University in Hempstead, New York, where his fellow students were Francis Ford Coppola and the budding actress Lainie Kazan. He eventually enrolled in New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and was there for five years, alongside fellow actor and future Godfather co-star Robert Duvall.
After some off-Broadway work, Caan made his on-Broadway debut in 1961 in the army comedy Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole by the sibling playwrights James and William Goldman. It also marked the New York debut of Peter Fonda. In the same year, Caan made his first television appearance, as a street gang leader, in Route 66. He was later to find fame in Brian's Song (1970), ABC TV's Movie of the Week about a Chicago Bears footballer who developed terminal cancer. It brought Caan a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He made further occasional television appearances at other times during his career, including 88 episodes of Las Vegas from 2002 in which he played Ed Deline, a former CIA officer in charge of a fictional casino in Vegas.
James Caan’s film debut came in an uncredited role in Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce (1963) with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Then, in what became a lifetime of playing hoodlums, Caan was one of a trio of thugs tormenting Olivia de Havilland trapped in a lift in Lady in a Cage. The Glory Guys (1965) was a Western about Custer's last stand, scripted by Sam Peckinpah, while Red Line 7000 was Howard Hawks’ actioner about stock car racers which Caan disowned as a joke. El Dorado (1966) was Hawks’ remake of his 1959 Rio Bravo, again with John Wayne.
By then Caan was playing some reasonable if not great parts in, say, Curtis Harrington's Games, with Simone Signoret, and Robert Altman's sci-fi Countdown, with Robert Duvall, but it was The Rain People in 1969 that brought him to the attention of Francis Ford Coppola who cast him as 'Killer' in a kind of road movie with Shirley Knight and Robert Duvall. This obviously led to Caan's appearance in Coppola's mafia and drugs drama The Godfather, in the part of Marlon Brando's son, a role he repeated in the sequel.
Caan was often depicted as a lawless loser in such movies as Slither, Cinderella Liberty, The Gambler (Karel Reisz's loose adaptation of Dostoevsky for which Caan was nominated for a Golden Globe), and Freebie and the Bean, in which he played a maverick cop alongside Alan Arkin. He was the impresario Billy Rose opposite Barbra Streisand in Funny Lady, the ill-conceived sequel to Funny Girl, and went on to make many more films including Norman Jewison's Rollerball, Peckinpah's The Killer Elite, Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far, Alan J. Pakula's Comes a Horseman, and Hide in Plain Sight (1980), a crime drama that Caan also directed. He renewed working with Coppola on Gardens of Stone, a 1987 film about the US military and Vietnam.
After playing a crime boss in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, Caan's biggest success was in Rob Reiner's Misery (1990), a Stephen King story about a celebrated author who is holed up after crashing his car in the snow, only to be looked after by a crazy fan played by Kathy Bates. Caan spent most of the film tied to his bed in William Goldman's gripping screenplay, but it was Kathy Bates who won an Oscar for her stunningly outrageous performance. Caan continued in films until 2021 but seldom repeated the promise of his early work. He generally played tough characters and was extremely good at depicting the bad side of life, people who were constantly in a fix of some sort or another.
His private life off-screen reflected a fair share of trouble during his career, not least of which was having four wives. He married Dee Jay Mathis in 1961 and had a daughter, Tara, in 1964. He was briefly married to Sheila Marie Ryan in 1976, and they have a son, the actor Scott Caan, but were divorced a year later. Caan then married Ingrid Hajek for five years from 1994 and they, too, have a son, Alexander. Finally, he married Linda Stokes in 1995 and they have two sons, James and Jacob, but they divorced in 2017. Sadly, James Caan was an ultra-conservative and a rabid supporter of Donald Trump. Well, you can't win 'em all.
MICHAEL DARVELL