Godfather role cast long shadow
James Caan, who has died aged 82, was an actor whose personality was a beguiling mix of the intensity and recklessness that made him unforgettable as the swaggering Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s Mafia epic The Godfather (1972), for which he was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe.
The Godfather established Caan as a bankable star (‘‘the toughest man in films’’, as he was characterised). He reprised the role for flashback scenes in the sequel The Godfather: Part II (1974) and took starring roles in films including Cinderella Liberty (1973), The Gambler (1974), Funny Lady (1975), Rollerball (1975), The Killer Elite (1975) and Comes A Horseman (1978).
Caan brought an intensity to his characterisations born out of his training as a ‘‘Method’’ actor. When he was researching his part as the master-robber in Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), he hung out with real crooks and took lessons from them in blowing safes. For Rollerball, about an ultra-violent sport of the future, he got himself into shape by practising at rodeos, sustaining several injuries in the process.
But there were too many poor career choices. He turned down parts in Kramer vs Kramer (‘‘boring and bourgeois’’, he said), Apocalypse Now, Superman and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and he was unimpressive in the uneven copbuddy caper Freebie and the Bean (1974).
His performances in other films of that decade – among them Slither, The Killer Elite, Harry and Walter Go to New York and A Bridge Too Far – were on the whole quickly forgotten.
At the same time he gained a reputation for being difficult and temperamental. He walked off the set of The Holcroft Covenant (1985) and was replaced by Michael Caine.
By the early 1980s he had embarked on an orgy of self-destruction. After two failed marriages, in 1982 he dropped out of the acting world – dogged by a reputation for cocaine use, and devastated by the death of his sister and manager, Barbara, from leukaemia in 1981.
Headlines such as ‘‘Caan in drug clinic’’, ‘‘Caan accused of beating model’’, ‘‘Caan quizzed over death plunge’’, ‘‘Caan stands bail in Mafia case’’ and ‘‘Caan struggles for cash’’ told a tawdry tale. For a while he lived at the Playboy mansion, and in the late 1980s learnt that he owed $247,000 to the Internal Revenue Service and had no funds to pay it.
Then, in 1990, he played a novelist held hostage by an obsessed fan in the screen version of Stephen King’s Misery, giving a powerful performance that propelled him back into the mainstream.
From then on he worked more or less non-stop, alternating small-budget indies such as Bottle Rocket (1996) and This Is My Father (1998) with big studio productions such as Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) and Eraser (1997).
From 2003 to 2007 he starred in the American television series Las Vegas as Edward ‘‘Big Ed’’ Deline, the former president of operations of the Montecito Resort & Casino.
The role of Sonny Corleone cast a long shadow, however. In a cast that included Marlon Brando as his ageing father and Al Pacino as his sombre younger brother Michael, Caan more than held his own as the coarsely sexy and hot-tempered Sonny.
Advising Michael on how to kill a rival mobster and a corrupt police captain, he declares that ‘‘you gotta get up close, like this – and bada bing! You blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.’’
The phrase ‘‘bada bing’’ was improvised by Caan and ‘‘became a mantra for mobsters and aspiring mobsters’’, Vanity Fair reported in 2009, and served as the name of Tony Soprano’s strip club on the TV show The Sopranos.
Sonny gets his comeuppance when he is bloodied in a battlefield’s worth of machine-gun fire while trapped in his car at a tollbooth. In a scene that took three days to film, Caan wore nearly 150 tiny explosive charges called squibs. ‘‘When they went off, it felt like I was being punched all over,’’ he said. ‘‘I wouldn’t have done it, if there hadn’t been so many girls around the set to impress.’’
The film made him a cult hero in New York’s Little Italy. ‘‘Once about 15 years ago, they decided to name me the Italian of the Year,’’ he recalled in 1999. ‘‘They did it again about four or five years ago. And I keep telling them, ‘I’m a Jewish guy from Sunnyside, Queens.’ ’’
One of three children, James Edmund Caan was born in the Bronx, New York, to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Germany, and grew up in Sunnyside. His father was a kosher meat dealer and butcher.
James was educated in New York City and attended Michigan State University, but transferred to Hofstra University in New York. He did not graduate, but instead caught the acting bug and won a place at New York City’s Neighbourhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, a centre of the Method approach to acting. He studied at the school for five years.
Caan worked off-Broadway, and appeared in such television series as Route 66, Wagon Train and Dr Kildare. He made his first credited film debut as a punk who terrorises Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage (1964).
As his career faltered in the 1980s he worked as an athletics coach. It was his old friend Coppola who helped him to come back by casting him as a battlehardened platoon sergeant in the Vietnam-era film Gardens of Stone (1987), though it was Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990) that firmly put his career back on track.
He did not kick his cocaine habit until the early 1990s, when his 15-year-old son Scott turned up in the middle of a drug deal to take his father home.
‘‘Scott came over and he was gonna kill the guy with a baseball bat,’’ Caan recalled. ‘‘He wanted to kill the guy for me. So I was kind of smiling out of one eye and crying out of the other. If there was one thing that straightened my bent out, that did it right there and then.’’
James Caan was married and divorced four times: first to Dee Jay Mathis, with whom he had a daughter; to Sheila Marie Ryan (a former girlfriend of Elvis Presley), with whom he had a son, the actor Scott Caan; to Ingrid Hajek, with whom he had another son, and lastly to Linda Stokes, a costume designer with whom he had two more sons. –
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