James Caan

• 1. Introduction

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  James Caan once said that every improvisation he did in acting class ended in violence. "I just fell in love with acting," he later recalled. "Of course all my improvs ended in violence." The American actor carried that volatile energy into hot-tempered brothers, gamblers, safe crackers and gangsters. Yet his career was never a straight climb. A boy from Queens became so closely tied to a fictional crime family that people treated him as the real thing. Why did Hollywood keep insisting that his pictures never made money? What made him refuse some of the most famous films of his era? And why did he vanish from the screen for years, only to return for a part that many leading men had turned down?

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• 2. Queens To Broadway

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  On the 26th of March 1940, James Edmund Caan was born in the Bronx, New York City. His parents, Sophie and Arthur, were Jewish immigrants from Bingen am Rhein in Germany. Arthur sold meats of many kinds, including kosher meat, as Caan once explained to the interviewer Charlie Rose. The family later settled in Sunnyside, Queens, where James was one of three siblings. He grew into a lively boy who often got into street fights, and he loved boxing and motorcycles.

  In 1956 Caan went to Michigan State University and joined the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. He walked on to the football team as a quarterback under coach Duffy Daugherty, but the sport did not hold him. He moved to Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, and never graduated. His classmates there included Francis Ford Coppola and Lainie Kazan.

  At Hofstra, Caan grew curious about acting. He enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City and studied there for five years. Sanford Meisner was among his instructors. Off-Broadway work followed, including Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, and in 1961 he made his Broadway debut in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole.

  Naked City gave Caan his first television appearance, and steady work followed. He guested on Route 66, The Untouchables, Wagon Train and Death Valley Days, which he did twice. On Combat! he played a clever German sergeant. His first film was Irma la Douce in 1963. He was an uncredited soldier with a transistor radio, more interested in a baseball game than in the girl.

  A real part arrived in 1964 with the thriller Lady in a Cage. Caan played a punk hoodlum who has his eyes poked out, and the star Olivia de Havilland praised his work. The critic Stephen Vagg, writing in Filmink, later argued that Caan looked like a future star from the beginning. In Vagg's view he had New York training, good looks and a nervous intensity that radiated off the screen. Caan himself waved off the pressure to chase fame. When offered the lead in a television series, he said, "I want to be an actor not a millionaire."

  A Golden Globe for New Star of the Year in 1965 suggested the industry agreed with Vagg. That same year he landed his first starring part, in Howard Hawks' auto-racing drama Red Line 7000. It lost money. Hawks liked him anyway and cast him next in El Dorado. There Caan played a young man nicknamed Mississippi, backing up John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. Robert Altman gave him the lead in Countdown in 1967. A war film in the United Kingdom, Submarine X-1, and a Western, Journey to Shiloh, followed in 1968.

  Coppola cast him in The Rain People in 1969, and Caan won praise as a brain-damaged football player. Still, apart from El Dorado, none of these films did well at the box office. That included Rabbit, Run in 1970, based on the John Updike novel, which Caan had badly wanted to make. "No one would put me in a movie", he later recalled. "They all said, 'His pictures never make money'." A television movie in 1971 would finally change that.

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• 3. The Corleone Role

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  Caan did not want to go back to television in 1971. He turned down the role of the dying football player Brian Piccolo in Brian's Song several times. Then he read the script and changed his mind. Playing opposite Billy Dee Williams, he earned an Emmy nomination, and the film was a huge critical success.

  In The Godfather, released in 1972, Coppola cast Caan as the short-tempered Sonny Corleone. The path there was crooked. Caan had first been cast as Michael, Sonny's youngest brother. Both he and Coppola insisted that Al Pacino play Michael, which freed Caan to take Sonny instead. Robert De Niro had also been considered for Sonny, and another actor, Carmine Caridi, had already signed on. The studio eventually insisted on Caan, so he stayed in the production.

  The performance earned Caan an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, shared with his co-stars Robert Duvall and Pacino. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe. But the role followed him off the set. Caan said people called him a wiseguy, and that he won Italian of the Year twice in New York even though he was Jewish. Once a country club turned him away. A board member said he was a wiseguy who had been downtown, a made guy. Caan thought, "What? Are you out of your mind?"

  Caan came back to the role for a flashback scene in The Godfather Part II in 1974. More than three decades after the first film, he lent his voice to Sonny once more in the 2006 video game The Godfather.

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• 4. Stardom And Refusals

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  By 1973, Caan was an established movie star, and he spent the next several years choosing scripts of very uneven quality. Slither was a road movie written by W. D. Richter. Cinderella Liberty paired him with Marsha Mason under the director Mark Rydell. In 1974 he played the title role in The Gambler, directed by Karel Reisz. The script by James Toback had originally been written for De Niro. Reviews were good, and a Golden Globe nomination followed. The action comedy Freebie and the Bean, with Alan Arkin, did better at the box office.

  Funny Lady was a hit in 1975. Caan played the showman Billy Rose opposite Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice, and it brought him another Golden Globe nomination. That year he also starred in Norman Jewison's Rollerball, as a star athlete in a deadly extreme sport, and in Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite. Both were popular, though Caan hated The Killer Elite. He won a Saturn Award for Rollerball.

  He was not shy about disliking his own choices. Harry and Walter Go to New York left him so unhappy that he fired his management. He said he had not wanted to make it or The Killer Elite, but that people kept telling him he had to be commercial. A Bridge Too Far in 1977 put him among many stars. That same year, in France, he made Another Man, Another Chance for the director Claude Lelouch. He worked for what he called peanuts and loved every minute.

  Back in the United States, he made the modern Western Comes a Horseman with Jane Fonda, directed by Alan J. Pakula. He reunited with Marsha Mason for Chapter Two, from Neil Simon's autobiographical play. Caan later said he took it only for the money, which he needed to fund his first film as a director. Chapter Two was a hit.

  In 1978 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He also directed Hide in Plain Sight, about a father searching for his children, who were lost in the Witness Protection Program. Critics praised it, but the public response was only moderate.

  In 1977, Caan scored some of his own films out of ten. The Godfather got a 10, Funny Lady a 9, and The Gambler and Rollerball an 8 each. The Killer Elite earned a 5, and Harry and Walter Go to New York a flat 0. Another Man, Another Chance matched The Godfather at 10.

  Just as telling was the list of what he said no to. During his peak years he rejected leading parts in MAS*H and The French Connection. He also passed on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner and Love Story. Kramer vs. Kramer struck him as "such middle class bourgeois baloney." He passed on Apocalypse Now because Coppola mentioned something about 16 weeks in the Philippine jungles. And he declined Superman, because he did not want to wear the cape.

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• 5. Burnout And Return

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  Michael Mann's Thief in 1981 cast Caan as a professional safe cracker. The film was not successful at the time, but his performance was widely lauded, and it has since gathered a cult following. Caan always praised Mann's script and direction. He often said that, next to The Godfather, it was the film he was proudest of. That year he also appeared in Les Uns et les Autres, another Lelouch picture. It was popular in France and won the Technical Grand Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

  Then he stopped. From 1982 to 1987 Caan made no films. His sister Barbara had died of leukemia in 1981 at the age of 38, and he fell into depression. A growing cocaine problem and what he called Hollywood burnout compounded it. In a 1992 interview he said the period produced a lot of mediocrity. Directors, he felt, had become too important and did not want anyone distracting from their own prowess. It was a time when he told himself he would not work again.

  He walked off the set of The Holcroft Covenant, and Michael Caine replaced him. He spent much of these years coaching children's sports. In 1985 he was in a car crash. He had believed he was set for life, but discovered one day that he was flat broke. He did not want to work, he said. "But then when the dogs got hungry and I saw their ribs, I decided that maybe now it's a good idea."

  Coppola brought him back in 1987 with Gardens of Stone. Caan played an army platoon sergeant with the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, known as The Old Guard. The film dealt with the Vietnam War's effect on the American home front. He accepted only a quarter of his pre-hiatus salary. He then had to pay tens of thousands more to the completion bond company because of the Holcroft walkout. "I don't know what it is, but, boy, when you're down, they like to stomp on you", he said.

  Gardens of Stone was not a popular success. Alien Nation in 1988 was. Caan played a cop partnered with an alien, and the film earned a television spinoff. He then took a supporting role as Spaldoni, buried under heavy makeup, in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. A better offer was about to arrive from Rob Reiner.

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• 6. A Second Act

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  In 1990, Caan was planning an action film in Italy when he heard that Rob Reiner needed a leading man. Reiner was adapting Stephen King's Misery. The role of Paul Sheldon required the actor to lie in bed for most of the film while his nurse tormented him. Many of Hollywood's leading actors had refused it. Caan accepted, and the performance won him a Saturn Award.

  The 1990s brought a loose run of character parts. He co-starred with Bette Midler in the costly For the Boys, directed by Rydell. Rydell called him one of the four or five best actors in America. In 1992 Caan played a gangster in the comedy Honeymoon in Vegas, and in 1993 he was Coach Winters in The Program. In A Boy Called Hate, he acted alongside his son Scott Caan. In 1996 he appeared in Wes Anderson's directorial debut Bottle Rocket and in Eraser, with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He played Philip Marlowe in the HBO film Poodle Springs in 1998. A year later he played a comic gangster opposite Hugh Grant in Mickey Blue Eyes.

  The early 2000s were crowded and uneven. Caan appeared in The Yards with Mark Wahlberg, directed by James Gray. He also made Luckytown, The Way of the Gun, Lathe of Heaven and City of Ghosts. Most of these were not widely seen. Dogville and Elf in 2003, where he had key supporting roles, were big successes on the art house and commercial circuit respectively. In Elf he played the estranged book publisher father of Will Ferrell's character.

  That same year he auditioned for the series Las Vegas and won the role of Ed Deline, president of the Montecito Hotel and Casino. He stayed for 88 episodes. On the 27th of February 2007, he announced that he would not return for a fifth season, because he wanted to go back to film work. Tom Selleck replaced him.

  Later parts were often playful. Caan was the President of the United States in the 2008 film Get Smart. In 2009 he voiced Tim Lockwood in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. He appeared opposite his son Scott in an episode of Hawaii Five-0 in 2012. In 2013 he played the Chicago mob boss Sy Berman in the Starz drama Magic City. He also tried a sitcom, Back in the Game, with Maggie Lawson. As of 2010 he chaired an internet company called Openfilm, meant to help up-and-coming filmmakers.

  Preggoland, which premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, was one of his later films. In 2019 he starred in Out of Blue, a crime drama from the director Carol Morley. In 2021 he appeared in Queen Bees with Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margret. His final film role came in Fast Charlie, with Pierce Brosnan, released in 2023.

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• 7. Rodeo, Karate, And Rumors

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  Caan called himself the only Jewish cowboy from New York on the professional rodeo cowboy circuit. He competed in steer wrestling at rodeos. He was also a serious martial artist. He trained under Takayuki Kubota for nearly 30 years and reached the rank of Master, 6th Dan, in Gosoku-ryu Karate. The International Karate Association granted him the title Soke Dai.

  Caan married four times. In 1961 he wed Dee Jay Mathis, and they had a daughter, Tara, born in 1964, before divorcing in 1966. His second marriage, to Sheila Marie Ryan, a former girlfriend of Elvis Presley, began in 1976 and was short-lived. Their son, the actor Scott Caan, was born on the 23rd of August 1976. Caan was married to Ingrid Hajek from September 1990 to March 1994, and they had a son, Alexander James, born in 1991.

  During that third marriage, the Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss told Vanity Fair in 1994 that she had been in a relationship with Caan. She said she visited him on the set of Flesh and Bone in Texas in 1992. Caan said the relationship was platonic. His fourth marriage, to Linda Stokes on the 7th of October 1995, produced two sons. They were James Arthur, born in 1995, and Jacob Nicholas, born in 1998. Caan filed for divorce in 2017, citing irreconcilable differences.

  In 1994 a Los Angeles rap artist accused Caan of pulling a gun on him, and Caan was arrested and then released. Politically, he supported Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

  The Godfather also drew him into the company of real mobsters. During production in 1971, he spent time with Carmine Persico, known as The Snake and later head of the Colombo crime family. Government agents briefly mistook the then little-known actor for an aspiring gangster. Caan was also a friend of the Colombo mobster Andrew Russo, who became godfather to Scott Caan. In 1982, according to a conversation intercepted by the FBI, Caan asked the mobster Anthony Fiato to beat up Joe Pesci. The reason was an unpaid $8,000 hotel bill.

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• 8. The Unfinished Cameo

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  On the 6th of July 2022, Caan died at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles at the age of 82. The cause was a heart attack brought on by coronary artery disease. He also had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure. He was buried at Eden Memorial Park Cemetery.

  Tributes arrived from many people he had worked with. They included Rob Reiner, Francis Ford Coppola, Barbra Streisand, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Talia Shire, Robert Duvall, Kathy Bates, Will Ferrell and Marsha Mason also paid tribute.

  One role was left unfinished. In 2021 Caan was announced as part of the cast of Coppola's long-cherished project Megalopolis. He asked Coppola for a cameo because he saw the film as a possible swan song. Coppola responded by creating a character for him, Nush "The Fixer" Berman. After Caan's death, Dustin Hoffman offered to take over the part and was cast in it.

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