Actor James Caan dies at 82. He was best known for playing the hot-tempered Sonny Corleone in ‘The Godfather.’
The son of a butcher who had fled Nazi Germany, Mr. Caan grew up in the 1940s and ’50s on the knockabout streets of New York’s outer boroughs. A wiry boy, he was dubbed “Killer Caan” for his use of his fists in self-defense, and he prided himself on never losing his street-wise edge or raspy Queens accent. He remained, he said, just a “punk from Sunnyside,” even as his enigmatic smile and aura of danger propelled a Hollywood career lasting six decades and spanning more than 130 credits.
Reviewers praised him as a brain-damaged ex-jock in “The Rain People” , directed by Francis Ford Coppola but little seen because studio executives lost faith in its commercial appeal. His breakout role was the terminally ill Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo in the TV filmThe ABC movie, which touched on interracial friendship, attracted 55 million viewers and earned Mr. Caan an Emmy nomination as best actor.
of greatest films of all time. Mr. Caan, who was nominated for a best supporting actor trophy, was inundated for decades with exact-change and E-ZPass jokes.After “The Godfather,” Mr. Caan said he was rarely given a script that did not feature a pile of corpses in the first 10 minutes.
“When Francis called me up about ‘Apocalypse Now,’ all I heard him say was ‘16 weeks in the Philippine jungle,’ ” Mr. Caan told The Washington Post, explaining his rejection. Meanwhile, he pursued a decadent lifestyle as an habitue of the Playboy Mansion. He spiraled into cocaine addiction after the death of his younger sister and closest confidant, from leukemia in 1981. Around that time, he lost his life savings — and his home — after it was discovered that he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. He blamed incompetent business managers but also himself for being too addled by drugs at the time to notice.Mr.
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