Caan was born on March 26, 1940, in The Bronx, New York City, to Sophie (née Falkenstein; 1915–2016)[3] and Arthur Caan (1909–1986), Jewish immigrants from Bingen am Rhein, Rhineland, Germany.[4][5][6] His father was a kosher meat dealer.[7] James grew up a lively boy and often participated in street fights. At that time he enjoyed boxing, rodeo and motorcycle riding.[8] One of three siblings,[9][10] Caan grew up in Sunnyside, Queens. His sister, Barbara Emily Caan (Licker), died of leukemia in 1981, aged 38.[4]
While studying at Hofstra University, Caan became intrigued with acting. He enrolled in New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre,[14] where he studied for five years. One of his instructors was Sanford Meisner.[15] "I just fell in love with acting," he later recalled. "Of course all my improvs ended in violence."[16]
His first film was Irma la Douce (1963), 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.[24] According to 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 (New York trained, Broadway broken). 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.[25]
Caan's first substantial film role was as a punk hoodlum who gets his eyes poked out in the 1964 thrillerLady in a Cage, which starred Olivia de Havilland, who praised Caan's performance.[26] He had roles in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Wagon Train.[27] He was fourth-billed in a Western feature, The Glory Guys (1965).[28] He turned down the starring role in a TV series around this time, saying, "I want to be an actor not a millionaire."[29]
He 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".[36]
None of these films, apart from El Dorado, was particularly successful at the box office, including Rabbit, Run (1970), 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."[39] "No one would put me in a movie", he later recalled. "They all said, 'His pictures never make money'."[40]
1970s
Caan returned to the small screen with the TV movie Brian's Song (1971), playing dying football player Brian Piccolo, opposite Billy Dee Williams.[41] Caan did not want to return to television and turned down the role several times,[42] but changed his mind after reading the script. The film was a huge critical success and Caan's performance earned him an Emmy nomination.[40] He got a deal to make a film and agreed to be in T.R. Baskin.[43]
The following year, Coppola cast him as the short-tempered Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. Originally, Caan was cast as Michael Corleone (Sonny's youngest brother); 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,[44] so he remained in the production.[45] Caan was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the film,[46] along with co-stars Robert Duvall and Pacino.[47] 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?"[48]
Back in the United States, Caan made a modern-day Western, Comes a Horseman (1978), with Jane Fonda for director Alan J. Pakula.[65] He was reunited with Marsha Mason in the film adaptation of Neil Simon's autobiographical Chapter Two (1979).[66] 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.[67]
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.[68] Despite critical praise, the film was only moderately successful with the public.[69]
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 ("it was such middle class bourgeois baloney"[70]), Apocalypse Now (because Coppola "mentioned something about 16 weeks in the Philippine jungles"[64]), Blade Runner, Love Story, and Superman ("I didn't want to wear the cape".[64]).[70][71] In 1977, Caan rated several of his movies out of ten – The Godfather (10), Freebie and the Bean (4), Cinderella Liberty (8), The Gambler (8), Funny Lady (9), Rollerball (8), The Killer Elite (5), Harry and Walter Go to New York (0), Slither (4), A Bridge Too Far (7), and Another Man Another Chance (10).[60] He also liked his performances in The Rain People and Thief.[72]
1980s
Caan had a role in Claude Lelouch's Les Uns et les Autres (1981), which was popular in France,[73] and won the Technical Grand Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.[74] In Hollywood, Caan appeared in the neo-noir film Thief (1981), directed by Michael Mann, in which he played a professional safe cracker.[75] Although the film was not successful at the time, Caan's performance was widely lauded and the movie has acquired something of a cult following.[76] Caan always praised Mann's script and direction and often said that, next to The Godfather, Thief was the movie of which he was proudest.[77]
From 1982 to 1987, Caan suffered from depression over his sister's death from leukemia, a growing problem with cocaine, and what he described as "Hollywood burnout"[70] and did not act in any films.
In a 1992 interview, Caan said that this was a time when "a lot of mediocrity was produced. Because I think that directors got to the point where they made themselves too important. They didn't want anything or anybody to distract from their directorial prowess. There were actors who were good and capable, but they would distract from the special effects. It was a period of time when I said, 'I'm not going to work again.'"[78]
He walked off the set of The Holcroft Covenant and was replaced by Michael Caine. Caan devoted much of his time during these years to coaching children's sports.[16] In 1985, he was in a car crash.[79] Caan considered retiring for good but instead of being "set for life", as he believed, he found out one day that "I was flat-ass broke... I didn't want to work. But then when the dogs got hungry and I saw their ribs, I decided that maybe now it's a good idea."[80]
Caan returned to acting in 1987, when Coppola cast him as an army platoon sergeant for the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) in Gardens of Stone, a movie that dealt with the effect of the Vietnam War on the United States homefront.[81] He only received a quarter of his pre-hiatus salary, and then had to kick in tens of thousands more to the completion bond company because of Holcroft. "I don't know what it is, but, boy, when you're down, they like to stomp on you", he said.[80] The movie was not a popular success but Alien Nation (1988), where Caan played a cop who partnered with an alien, did well. The film received a television spinoff.[82] He had a support role as Spaldoni, under much make up, in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy.[83]
1990s
Caan was planning to make an action film in Italy, but then heard Rob Reiner was looking for a leading man in his adaptation of Stephen King's Misery (1990). Since the script for Misery called for the male lead, Paul Sheldon, to spend most of his time lying in bed tormented by his nurse, the role was turned down by many of Hollywood's leading actors before Caan accepted.[80] Caan had a small role in The Dark Backward (1991) and co-starred with Bette Midler in the expensive For the Boys (1991), directed by Rydell who called Caan "one of the four or five best actors in America".[70]
In 2003, Caan portrayed Jimmy the Con in the film This Thing of Ours, whose associate producer was Sonny Franzese, longtime mobster and underboss of the Colombo crime family.[98] The same year, Caan played Will Ferrell's estranged book publisher father in the enormously successful family Christmas comedy Elf, and auditioned for, and won, the role of Montecito Hotel/Casino president "Big Ed" Deline in Las Vegas.[99] On February 27, 2007, 27 days before his 67th birthday, Caan announced that he would not return to the show for its fifth season to return to film work; he was replaced by Tom Selleck.[100]
Caan married four times. In 1961,[114] he married Dee Jay Mathis; they divorced in 1966. They had a daughter, Tara (born 1964). Caan's second marriage to Sheila Marie Ryan (a former girlfriend of Elvis Presley) in 1976 was short-lived; they divorced the following year.[115] Their son, Scott Caan, also an actor, was born August 23, 1976.
Caan was married to Ingrid Hajek from September 1990 to March 1994; they had a son, Alexander James Caan, born 1991. In a 1994 interview with Vanity Fair, Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss claimed to be in a relationship with Caan during his marriage to Hajek in 1992, visiting him on the set of Flesh and Bone in Texas.[116] Caan said his relationship with Fleiss was platonic.[117]
Caan married Linda Stokes on October 7, 1995, they had two sons, James Arthur Caan (born 1995) and Jacob Nicholas Caan (born 1998). Caan filed for divorce in 2017, citing irreconcilable differences.[118]
In 1994, Caan was arrested and released after being accused by a Los Angeles rap artist of pulling a gun on him.[119]
He also took part in steer roping at rodeos and referred to himself as the "only Jewish cowboy from New York on the professional rodeo cowboy circuit."[121]
Alleged links to organized crime
During production of The Godfather in 1971, Caan was known to hang out with Carmine Persico, also known as "The Snake",[122] a notorious mafioso and later head of the Colombo crime family. Government agents briefly mistook Caan, who was relatively unknown at the time, as an aspiring mobster.[123][124] Caan was also a friend of Colombo Family mobster Andrew Russo who is the godfather of Caan's son Scott Caan.[125]
In 1982, according to a conversation intercepted by the FBI between Caan and mobster Anthony Fiato, Caan had Fiato beat up actor Joe Pesci over Pesci failing to pay an $8,000 bill to a hotel.[126][127]
Political views
Caan supported Donald Trump during the 2016 and 2020 United States presidential elections.[128]
In 2021 Caan was announced to be a member of the cast of Coppola's longtime passion project Megalopolis.[133] Caan petitioned Coppola for a cameo appearance as he saw this film as his potential swan song, leading Coppola to create Nush "The Fixer" Berman for Caan. After Caan's death, Dustin Hoffman offered to take over the role and was cast.[134]: 3
^Mitchell, E., Mitchell, B., (Writers), McEveety, B. (Director).(1963, November 26). Anatomy of a Patrol [Television Episode]. Combat! ABC Productions.
^ abcdBernard Weinraub (November 17, 1991). "James Caan Rises From the Ashes of His Career". The New York Times. p. H13. It wasn't that I did bad pictures. I just banished myself for a while.
^Siskel, Gene (May 11, 1980). "Movies: James Caan: Frustrated star talks tough about his career Tough talk from a frustrated star". Chicago Tribune. p. D2.