James Caan
James Edmund Caan was an American actor. He came to prominence playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1978.
After early roles in Howard Hawks' El Dorado, Robert Altman's Countdown and Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People, Caan gained acclaim for his portrayal of Brian Piccolo in the 1971 television movie Brian's Song, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie nomination. Caan received Golden Globe Award nominations for his performances in the drama The Gambler, and the musical Funny Lady. He continued to receive significant roles in feature films such as Cinderella Liberty, Rollerball, A Bridge Too Far, Comes a Horseman, Chapter Two and Thief.
After a five-year break from acting, he returned with roles in Gardens of Stone, Misery, Honeymoon in Vegas, Eraser, Mickey Blue Eyes, The Yards, City of Ghosts, Elf and Get Smart.
Early life
Caan was born on March 26, 1940, in The Bronx, New York City, to Sophie and Arthur Caan, Jewish immigrants from Bingen am Rhein, Rhineland, Germany. His father sold a wide variety of meats, according to James Caan in an interview with Charlie Rose as well as kosher meats. James grew up a lively boy and often participated in street fights. At that time, he enjoyed boxing, rodeo and motorcycle riding. One of three siblings, Caan grew up in Sunnyside, Queens. His sister, Barbara Emily Caan Licker, died of leukemia in 1981, aged 38.Caan was educated in New York City, and later attended Michigan State University. He was a member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity during his two years at Michigan State. During his time at MSU he played football as a walk-on quarterback for Coach Duffy Daugherty but only stayed for one year in 1956. He later transferred to Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, but did not graduate. His classmates at Hofstra included Francis Ford Coppola and Lainie Kazan.
While studying at Hofstra University, Caan became intrigued with acting. He enrolled in New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he studied for five years. One of his instructors was Sanford Meisner. "I just fell in love with acting," he later recalled. "Of course all my improvs ended in violence."
Career
1960s
Caan began appearing off-Broadway in plays such as Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde before making his 1961 Broadway debut in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole. In 1969, he starred in Coppola's The Rain People.File:James Caan Karyn Kupcinet Roy Thinnes Death Valley Days 1963.jpg|thumb|upright|left|James Caan, Karyn Kupcinet, and Roy Thinnes appeared in the "Shadow of Violence" episode of Death Valley Days
Caan's first television appearance was in an episode of Naked City. He was also seen in episodes of Play of the Week, Route 66, Alcoa Premiere, Dr. Kildare, The Untouchables, The Doctors and the Nurses, Wagon Train, Death Valley Days, Wide Country, and Combat! as a clever German sergeant. He guest-starred on Ben Casey and Kraft Suspense Theatre.
His first film was Irma la Douce, in which he had an uncredited bit part as a U.S. soldier with a transistor radio more interested in a baseball game than the girl. According to critic Stephen Vagg in Filmink magazine:
People thought Caan was going to be a star pretty much from the get-go. And it's not hard to see why. Watch him in his early movies and TV appearances, and he's simply got "it": he was handsome, virile-looking, and could act. Most of all, he had X factor: a nervous energy and intensity that you can feel off the screen. A lot of stars take a while to warm up – Caan was good from the beginning.
Caan's first substantial film role was as a punk hoodlum who gets his eyes poked out in the 1964 thriller Lady in a Cage, which starred Olivia de Havilland, who praised Caan's performance. He had roles in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Wagon Train. He was fourth-billed in a Western feature, The Glory Guys. He turned down the starring role in a TV series around this time, saying, "I want to be an actor not a millionaire."
In 1965, Caan landed his first starring role in Howard Hawks' auto-racing drama Red Line 7000. It was not a financial success. However, Hawks liked Caan and cast him in his next film, El Dorado, playing Alan Bourdillion Traherne, nicknamed Mississippi, in support of John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. He had the starring role in Robert Altman's second feature film, Countdown and was second billed in the Curtis Harrington thriller Games. Caan went to the United Kingdom to star in a war film, Submarine X-1, then played the lead in a Western, Journey to Shiloh.
Caan returned to television with a guest role in The F.B.I.. He had an uncredited spot on the spy sitcom Get Smart as a favor to star Don Adams, playing Rupert of Rathskeller in the episode "To Sire with Love".
Caan won praise for his role as a brain-damaged football player in The Rain People, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He starred with Stefanie Powers in a Western called Gone with the West, filmed in 1969 but not released until 1975.
None of these films, apart from El Dorado, was particularly successful at the box office, including Rabbit, Run, based on the John Updike novel of the same name, in which Caan had the lead. He said it "was a film I really wanted to do, really wanted to be involved with." "No one would put me in a movie", he later recalled. "They all said, 'His pictures never make money'."
1970s
Caan returned to the small screen with the TV movie Brian's Song, playing dying football player Brian Piccolo, opposite Billy Dee Williams. Caan did not want to return to television and turned down the role several times, but changed his mind after reading the script. The film was a huge critical success and Caan's performance earned him an Emmy nomination. He got a deal to make a film and agreed to be in T.R. Baskin.The following year, Coppola cast him as the short-tempered Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. Originally, Caan was cast as Michael Corleone ; both Coppola and Caan demanded that this role be played by Al Pacino, so Caan could play Sonny instead. Robert De Niro was also considered to play Sonny. Although another actor, Carmine Caridi, was already signed to play Sonny, the studio eventually insisted on having Caan, so he remained in the production. Caan was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the film, along with co-stars Robert Duvall and Pacino. Caan was closely identified with the role for years afterward: "They called me a wiseguy. I won Italian of the Year twice in New York, and I'm Jewish, not Italian.... I was denied in a country club once. Oh yeah, the guy sat in front of the board, and he says, 'No, no, he's a wiseguy, been downtown. He's a made guy.' I thought, What? Are you out of your mind?"
Caan was now established as a leading movie star. He was in a road movie, Slither, based on a script by W. D. Richter; and a romantic comedy with Marsha Mason, Cinderella Liberty, directed by Mark Rydell. He received good reviews for playing the title role in The Gambler, based on a script by James Toback originally written for Robert De Niro, and directed by Karel Reisz. More popular at the box office was the action comedy Freebie and the Bean with Alan Arkin.
Caan reprised his role as Sonny Corleone for a flashback scene in The Godfather Part II. He had a hit with Funny Lady playing Billy Rose opposite Barbra Streisand's Fanny Brice. Caan starred in two action films, Norman Jewison's Rollerball as a star athlete of a deadly extreme sport, and Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite. Both were popular, though Caan hated Elite. He made a cameo in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie, and tried comedy with Rydell's Harry and Walter Go to New York. Caan was so unhappy with the latter he sacked his management. He said he did not want to make Elite or Harry but "people kept telling me I had to be commercial."
Caan was one of many stars in the war film A Bridge Too Far. He had a change of pace when he went to France to make Another Man, Another Chance for director Claude Lelouch alongside Geneviève Bujold, which Caan did for "peanuts" and "loved" the experience.
Back in the United States, Caan made a modern-day Western, Comes a Horseman, with Jane Fonda for director Alan J. Pakula. He was reunited with Marsha Mason in the film adaptation of Neil Simon's autobiographical Chapter Two. Caan later said he only did the film for the money as he was trying to raise money for his directorial debut, but it was a success at the box office.
In 1978, Caan directed Hide in Plain Sight, a film about a father searching for his children, who were lost in the Witness Protection Program. Despite critical praise, the film was only moderately successful with the public.
During Caan's peak years of stardom, he rejected a series of starring roles that proved to be successes for other actors, in films including M*A*S*H, The French Connection, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Kramer vs. Kramer, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Love Story, and Superman. In 1977, Caan rated several of his movies out of ten – The Godfather, Freebie and the Bean, Cinderella Liberty, The Gambler, Funny Lady, Rollerball, The Killer Elite, Harry and Walter Go to New York, Slither, A Bridge Too Far, and Another Man Another Chance. He also liked his performances in The Rain People and Thief.