James Caan (1940 to 2022) was the American actor who played Sonny Corleone in The Godfather and the captive novelist Paul Sheldon in Misery.
Quick Specs
| Born | James Edmund Caan, March 26, 1940, the Bronx, New York City |
| Died | July 6, 2022, Los Angeles, aged 82 |
| Horror | Paul Sheldon in Misery (1990), opposite Kathy Bates |
| Signature roles | Brian Piccolo in Brian’s Song (1971); Sonny Corleone in The Godfather (1972); Frank in Thief (1981); Walter Hobbs in Elf (2003) |
| Training | Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, five years, with Sanford Meisner among his teachers |
| Honours | Oscar nomination, Best Supporting Actor (The Godfather); Emmy nomination (Brian’s Song); four Golden Globe nominations; Hollywood Walk of Fame star (1978) |
| Directed | Hide in Plain Sight (1980), his only feature as director |
Who He Is
James Caan was born James Edmund Caan in the Bronx on March 26, 1940, to Sophie (née Falkenstein) and Arthur Caan, Jewish immigrants from Germany. Arthur was a meat dealer and butcher, and the family ran a kosher meat market. James was one of three children and grew up in Sunnyside, Queens.
That background matters, because the role that made him famous was an Italian-American gangster so convincing that audiences assumed the actor was one too. He was not, and he enjoyed the confusion. “I won ’Italian of the Year’ twice in New York,” he liked to say, “and I’m Jewish, not Italian.”
He went to Michigan State University, where he went out for football, then transferred to Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. One of his classmates there was Francis Ford Coppola. Acting took hold at Hofstra, and he left without graduating for the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York, where he studied for five years, with Sanford Meisner among his teachers. “I just fell in love with acting,” he said. “Of course all my improvs ended in violence.”
He married four times: Dee Jay Mathis, Sheila Marie Ryan, Ingrid Hajek and Linda Stokes. He had five children, Tara, Scott, Alexander, James and Jacob, and Scott Caan followed him into acting. He died on the evening of July 6, 2022, in Los Angeles, at 82.
The Work, and What He Did in It
He started on stage and in television. After off-Broadway work, including La Ronde, he made his Broadway debut in 1961 in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole, then ran through the early-1960s guest-star circuit: Naked City (his first television appearance), Route 66, The Untouchables, Dr. Kildare, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Wagon Train and Combat! Offered a starring series early on, he turned it down. “I want to be an actor, not a millionaire,” he said, the first of the refusals that would shape his career.
His film debut was an uncredited bit in Irma la Douce (1963). He had his first substantial part as a hoodlum in Lady in a Cage (1964), his first starring role in Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000 (1965), and then played “Mississippi” for Hawks again in El Dorado (1966), alongside John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. Robert Altman’s Countdown followed, and then Coppola’s The Rain People (1969), where Caan was praised as a brain-damaged former football player. It was his first film with his old classmate, and the partnership that led to The Godfather.
The real breakthrough came on television. Brian’s Song (1971) was an ABC television movie in which he played Brian Piccolo, the Chicago Bears running back dying of cancer, opposite Billy Dee Williams as Gale Sayers. Their friendship as the NFL’s celebrated first interracial roommates is the film’s subject. Caan turned the part down four times because he did not want to go back to television, and changed his mind only after he read the script. He played a dying athlete without the sentimental machinery, the telefilm became a cultural event, and he earned an Emmy nomination at 31.
The Godfather (1972) made him a star, and its casting ran backwards from the finished film. Paramount first cast Caan as Michael Corleone and signed Carmine Caridi as Sonny. Coppola insisted on Al Pacino as Michael, and in the compromise Caan moved to Sonny, the hot-tempered, funny, violent and doomed eldest son, opposite Marlon Brando, Pacino, John Cazale and Robert Duvall. Robert De Niro had also been considered for the part. Caan played Sonny out of his own Queens childhood; as he put it, he “grew up in the neighborhood.” Sonny’s death at the tollbooth became the film’s signature sequence. He was 31 at the March 15, 1972 premiere, eleven days short of his 32nd birthday, and the role brought his only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, in a field that also included Pacino and Duvall. He came back as Sonny for a flashback cameo at the end of The Godfather Part II (1974).
The 1970s starring run went out of its way to avoid Sonny: Cinderella Liberty (1973); The Gambler (1974), as Axel Freed, a professor destroying himself at the tables, which brought a Golden Globe nomination; Funny Lady (1975), as Billy Rose opposite Barbra Streisand, another Globe nomination; Rollerball (1975), as Jonathan E., the star of a lethal corporate sport who refuses to retire on command; A Bridge Too Far (1977), as Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun, who forces a surgeon at gunpoint to operate on his apparently dead captain; Comes a Horseman (1978); and Chapter Two (1979). In Hide in Plain Sight (1980) he directed himself as a father searching for children who have vanished into witness protection. It is his only feature as director.
Thief (1981) was Michael Mann’s first feature, and the film Caan ranked next to The Godfather as the one he was proudest of. He plays Frank, a professional safecracker and ex-con who has built his whole life around one planned exit, and who takes a job from a Chicago crime boss (Robert Prosky) designed to make that exit impossible. Mann had him trained for real. The recently paroled safecracker John Santucci taught him the drills, saws and torches, and then played a corrupt cop in the film, and Caan also learned firearms handling. The vault sequences show his own hands doing the drilled procedure. He was 40 during filming and 41 when Thief opened in March 1981. It underperformed on release and grew into a canonical Mann film.
Then came the gap. After Kiss Me Goodbye (1982) he made no films until 1987. His sister Barbara died of leukaemia in 1981, and depression followed. There was a cocaine problem, which he went into rehab for, and what he called “Hollywood burnout.” “Everybody wants to do ’Rocky 9′ and ’Airport 96′ and ’Jaws 7,'” he said. In those years he walked off The Holcroft Covenant and was replaced by Michael Caine, coached children’s sports, and found that the money was gone. Coppola brought him back as Sergeant Clell Hazard of the Old Guard at Arlington in Gardens of Stone (1987), at a quarter of his former salary, when he was 47. The film was not a hit, but it restarted the career, and Alien Nation (1988) and a turn as Spaldoni in Dick Tracy (1990) followed.
Misery (1990) completed the comeback. Rob Reiner directed and William Goldman wrote it from Stephen King’s 1987 novel. Caan is Paul Sheldon, a romance novelist who crashes in a Colorado blizzard and is rescued, and then held prisoner, by Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), his self-declared number one fan, who forces him to bring back the heroine he has just killed off. The part is passive by design: for most of the film Sheldon is in bed with shattered legs, then in a wheelchair. That is why it was so hard to cast. A who’s who of leading men turned it down, and Goldman explained why: leading men “hate to be passive.” Caan, the most physical of stars, took it, and built the performance from his voice, his eyes, a show of ingratiation and the calculation hidden behind it. The hobbling, when Annie breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer to punish an escape attempt, is the film’s signature sequence, and it works because Caan sells the dread before the blow and the aftermath after it. Bates won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the film; Caan was not nominated, but he held his half of the two-hander, and Misery returned him to stardom at 50.
He worked steadily for the next three decades. He was opposite Bette Midler in For the Boys (1991). In Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) he parodied Sonny as the gambler who tries to win Nicolas Cage’s fiancée. After Flesh and Bone (1993) and Eraser (1996), he played the crime figure Mr. Henry in Wes Anderson’s debut, Bottle Rocket (1996), and then made Mickey Blue Eyes (1999). He had prestige supporting work in The Yards (2000) and City of Ghosts (2002). In Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) he is the Big Man, the gangster father whose arrival ends the film’s argument, a few minutes of screen time that carry the whole final movement.
In Elf (2003) he is Walter Hobbs, the children’s-book publisher who discovers that Will Ferrell’s Buddy is his son. He played it completely straight, a workaholic’s dry hostility as the wall Ferrell’s innocence keeps hitting, and at 63 he reached a generation that had never seen Sonny. Television brought him back as a series lead, “Big Ed” Deline in Las Vegas (2003 to 2008). He voiced Tim Lockwood in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) and its 2013 sequel. His last performance, a dying mob boss opposite Pierce Brosnan in Fast Charlie (2023), was released after his death.
Cool Verified Facts
- He refused Brian Piccolo four times before reading the script, and the role became his breakthrough.
- He was cast as Michael Corleone before he was Sonny. Carmine Caridi had already signed for Sonny when Coppola won the fight for Pacino.
- Hawks gave him his first starring role, Altman an early lead and Coppola his signature part, and he went on to anchor Michael Mann’s first feature.
- He studied Gosoku-ryu karate under Takayuki Kubota for nearly thirty years and reached 6th-dan master rank.
- A rodeo steer-wrestling sideline earned him his own description of himself as the “only Jewish cowboy from New York.”
- His football past made him natural casting for two damaged or dying football players, in The Rain People and Brian’s Song, before Sonny existed.
- His Hollywood Walk of Fame star, awarded in 1978, is at 6648 Hollywood Boulevard.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
Saying no was his signature. The core list of roles he turned down maps the 1970s by negation: M*A*S*H, The French Connection, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (the McMurphy role that won Jack Nicholson his first Oscar), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Apocalypse Now, Superman and Kramer vs. Kramer. He dismissed Kramer as “such middle class bourgeois baloney.” Of Superman, he said: “I didn’t want to wear the cape.” In 1988 he summed up the philosophy: “If there’s any one thing I could attribute my success to, it’s that I said ’no.'”
He trained with real thieves. Mann staffed Thief from both sides of the law. Santucci coached the safecracking, the ex-thief Gavin MacFadyen consulted, and Chicago detectives, among them Chuck Adamson and Dennis Farina in a small early role, filled out the world.
The physical life was real. Football, karate and rodeo were not publicity colour but the body he brought to Sonny, Piccolo and Jonathan E. That is what makes Paul Sheldon, a restless athlete pinned to a bed, such an unlikely and potent piece of casting.
Why He Matters
For horror, James Caan is the man who made stillness terrifying from the victim’s side of the bed. Misery is Kathy Bates’s film in the awards record, and her Oscar settles that she owns its monster. What Caan owns is its point of view. For most of the running time the audience is locked in the bed with Paul Sheldon, and the horror, from the dread of the hobbling to the typewriter turned instrument of torture to the slow arithmetic of escape, registers on a leading man who cannot stand up. That a star built on Sonny’s physicality accepted that passivity, when star after star had refused it, is the performance’s place in history.
He is also a hinge between old Hollywood and New Hollywood: Hawks and Wayne at one end, Coppola, Mann, Reiner, Wes Anderson and von Trier at the other, with a Will Ferrell Christmas classic thrown in. And the biography has a shape few careers match: a football hopeful, a Meisner student, a television movie, Sonny, stardom, bereavement and addiction, five lost years, a return for a quarter of his old salary, Misery at 50 and Walter Hobbs at 63.