James Caan: The butcher’s sensitive son with a gift for explosive violence

James Caan, whose death has been announced at the age of 82, was among a string of American actors to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s who balanced a capacity for bristly sensitivity with a gift for explosive violence.

Often playing a blue-collar oddball with scuffed knuckles, he excelled early on in films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s excellent The Rain People and in the made-for-TV weepie Brian’s Song. But it was his performance as Sonny Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather that properly etched those rough good looks into the collective consciousness.

Al Pacino played the intelligent prodigal. John Cazale was the weak-minded libertine. Caan was the hot-tempered warrior brought down by his own impetuousness. “I was always cast as Mister Tough Guy or Mister Hero,” he said last year. “They wouldn’t let me do much else.”

This wasn’t quite true, but he will be thought of first for characters with whom you would not mess.

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His reputation off-screen was also as something of a high liver. “I’ve got 14 screws in my left shoulder, six in my right, and three in my elbow,” he said in that same interview with the Independent of London. “One in my wrist, two in the other wrist, and one in each ankle.”

Caan was born in 1940, the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany. Dad was a butcher in the Bronx and his son remembered, as a kid, lugging meat around the rougher corners of New York City. Acting diverted him from the temptations of the streets.

In the late 1950s, while studying at Hofstra University, he decided to apply to Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where the legendary Sanford Meisner was teaching. “I just fell in love with acting,” he told the New York Times half a century later. “Of course all my improvs ended in violence.”

His undeniable charisma scored him a respectable amount of work on TV and in the theatre throughout the 1960s. The legendary Howard Hawks cast him as the lead in stock car drama Red Line 7000 and opposite John Wayne in the 1966 western El Dorado. Then his old mate Coppola, a fellow student at Hofstra, approached with the still-admired road movie The Rain People.

Caan played a former college football player cast into the world following a serious head injury. The part was perfect for the young actor: a tough guy only partially connected with his own vulnerability.

The Godfather changed the careers of all the talent involved. Al Pacino went up like rocket. Robert Duvall consolidated an already booming reputation as one of the era’s best character actors. Caan, who originally auditioned for Pacino’s role, didn’t land with quite the same force as that actor, but he had a decent 1970s.

He is great in the durable dystopia Rollerball. He was funny opposite Alan Arkin in Freebie and the Bean.

The wheels seem to have come off during the early 1980s. He was devastated by the early death of his sister in 1981 and, like many others in his profession during those years, took to cocaine. He described that drug misuse as being “like a death sentence”. But he survived and, after a period away from the camera, resurfaced in roles that often carried a little more damage.

Coppola cast him in the decent Gardens of Stone. He did good work in the science fiction flick Alien Nation. The proper comeback came, however, with his turn as an author captured by “number one fan” Kathy Bates in Rob Reiner’s tense, darkly funny Misery from 1990.

It is said the role was offered to virtually every lead actor in town — William Hurt, Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman — but all balked at the notion of spending almost the entire film trapped in bed. Caan was smart enough to relish the challenge. “Being a totally reactionary [sic] character is really much tougher,” he remarked. Bates won the Oscar. Caan found himself re-established as an ornament of the business.

He had few prominent starring roles in his later decades, but smart directors found ways to use an alleyway charm that had softened only marginally with middle-age. He was brave enough to sign on for Lars Von Trier’s avant-garde Dogville in 2003 and managed to adapt admirably to the director’s eccentric approach.

Caan’s home life was notably busy. He was married four times, most recently to Linda Stokes until their divorce in 2017. Scott Caan, son of his second wife Sheila Marie Ryan, is a successful actor and occasional rapper.

Never one to toe the Hollywood line, Caan emerged as a cautious supporter of Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election. “It’s a pretty dangerous world,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “So given the choices – which are not really wonderful – I am supporting Donald Trump in the hopes that his ego won’t get in the way, and that he’s smart enough to hire good people.”

As news of his death emerged, colleagues paid tribute to one of the legends from Hollywood’s golden post-classical run of the early 1970s. “I was so saddened to hear about Jimmy leaving us,” Rob Reiner said. “I loved working with him. Besides being a talented instinctive actor, he was the only Jew I knew who could calf rope with the best of them. Sending my love to his family.”

Caan will be seen next year opposite Pierce Brosnan in Philip Noyce’s gangster film Gun Monkeys. It sounds very like a James Caan project.