James Caan

Actor James Caan, who starred as gangster Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, has died at age 82.

Born March 26, 1939, in New York City, Caan was the son of a kosher meat wholesaler. Once again in demand, Caan starred in For the Boys with Bette Midler in 1991 as part of a song-and-dance team entertaining American soldiers during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. Caan left the show during the fourth season and it was later cancelled. Caan didn’t take a starring role in a TV series until 2003 but his first effort, Las Vegas, was an immediate hit. For much of the 1980s he made no films, telling people he preferred to coach his son Scott’s Little League games. He also made a brief appearance in a flashback sequence in The Godfather, Part II. In the film, based on Stephen King’s novel, Caan is an author taken captive by an obsessed fan who breaks his ankles to keep him from leaving. Caan was already a star on television, breaking through in the 1971 TV movie Brian’s Song, an emotional drama about Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo, who had died of cancer the year before at age 26. Despite Coppola’s fears he had made a flop, the 1972 release was an enormous critical and commercial success and brought supporting actor Oscar nominations for Caan, Duvall and Al Pacino. I just walked out of a picture at Paramount. I said you haven’t got enough money to make me go to work every day with a director I don’t like.” He managed a long career despite drug problems, outbursts of temper and minor brushes with the law. Before he can escape he is cut down by a seemingly endless fusillade of machine-gun fire.

James Caan, the US actor best known for playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, has died aged 82, his manager said Thursday.

“Jimmy was one of the greatest. James Caan, the US actor best known for playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, has died aged 82, his manager said Thursday. The legendary actor, best known for playing Sonny Corleone in the Godfather, has died aged 82.

Actor James Caan, who starred as gangster Santino "Sonny" Corleone in classic film The Godfather has died aged 82.

Love to the family." "So sorry to hear the news. "Jimmy was one of the greatest. Caan has 5 children, one of which also pursued an acting career. Friend and fellow actor Gary Sinise expressed his sadness at the news, writing on social media that he was "heartbroken for his family and friends" and that it had been "wonderful to know him and call him a pal." "Our relationship was always friendship before business.

US actor James Caan, who starred as gangster Sonny Corleone in epic mafia film The Godfather, has died at age 82.

Please click below to help InDaily continue to uncover the facts. His movies were best of the best,” Sandler said on Twitter. Billy Dee Williams, who starred with Caan in Brian’s Song, shared an undated photo of the two together in recent years on his Twitter account. Caan was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his portrayal of the hot-tempered Corleone in 1972’s The Godfather. James Edmund Caan was born in the Bronx borough of New York City on March 26, 1940 to German Jewish immigrants. He reprised the role in flashback scenes in The Godfather: Part II in 1974.

James Caan, the Oscar-nominated actor known for roles in the The Godfather, Brian's Song, Misery, and Elf, has...

- Jill Hennessy, who appeared with Caan in the TV series, Las Vegas, via Twitter. "So sad about Jimmy Caan. He was a legend. - Michael Mann, who directed Caan in the 1981 film Thief, via Instagram. He was always kind to me. A highlight of my career. He was always supportive of my career. They say never meet your heroes, but he proved that to be very very wrong." He even did a cameo in my tv special and got Robert Duvall to be in it. "Jimmy was my fictional brother and my lifelong friend. I'm bereft." "I can't believe Jimmy's gone. A great actor, a brilliant director and my dear friend.

James Caan, the curly-haired tough guy known to movie fans as the hotheaded Sonny Corleone of The Godfather and to television audiences as both the dying ...

He managed a long career despite drug problems, outbursts of temper and minor brushes with the law. So happy I got to know him. Always wanted to be like him.

James Caan, the Oscar-nominated actor known for roles in the The Godfather, Brian's Song, Misery, and Elf, has...

- Jill Hennessy, who appeared with Caan in the TV series, Las Vegas, via Twitter. "So sad about Jimmy Caan. He was a legend. - Michael Mann, who directed Caan in the 1981 film Thief, via Instagram. He was always kind to me. A highlight of my career. He was always supportive of my career. They say never meet your heroes, but he proved that to be very very wrong." He even did a cameo in my tv special and got Robert Duvall to be in it. "Jimmy was my fictional brother and my lifelong friend. I'm bereft." "I can't believe Jimmy's gone. A great actor, a brilliant director and my dear friend.

James Caan was the curly-haired tough guy known to movie fans as the hotheaded Sonny Corleone of The...

Born March 26, 1939, in New York City, Caan was the son of a kosher meat wholesaler. It's hard to believe that he won't be in the world anymore because he was so alive and daring. Caan left the show during the fourth season and it was later canceled. Once again in demand, Caan starred in For the Boys with Bette Midler in 1991 as part of a song-and-dance team entertaining US soldiers during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. Caan didn't take a starring role in a TV series until 2003 but his first effort, Las Vegas, was an immediate hit. In the film, based on Stephen King's novel, Caan is an author taken captive by an obsessed fan who breaks his ankles to keep him from leaving. For much of the 1980s he made no films, telling people he preferred to coach his son Scott's Little League games. For decades after, he once said, strangers would approach him on the street and jokingly warn him to stay clear of toll roads. He managed a long career despite drug problems, outbursts of temper and minor brushes with the law. Bates won an Oscar for the role. I just walked out of a picture at Paramount. I said you haven't got enough money to make me go to work every day with a director I don't like." Racing to find his sister's husband, Corleone stops at a toll booth that he discovers is unnervingly empty of customers.

Superb actor whose defining role of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather found echoes in his colourful personal life.

In later years, Caan was content to have the security of a popular TV series, Las Vegas (2003-07), appearing as a former CIA agent now the head of security at the fictional Montecito resort and casino. In The Rain People, the first of the three films Caan made with Coppola, a certain vulnerability and warmth surfaced as he played a soft-hearted drifter. While studying at Hofstra, he became interested in acting and was soon taken on by the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York, where he studied under Sanford Meisner, whose technique was allied to the method. His first role was as a young thug terrorising Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage (1964). Tough insouciance was his style, well suited to handsome but rather emotionless features. When his brother Ronnie was held at gunpoint by gangsters, Caan enlisted the help of his mafia pal Anthony “the Animal” Fiato. Caan arranged to meet and pay the kidnappers, then arrived with Fiato and his crew with guns and baseball bats. His first and last directorial effort, Hide in Plain Sight (1980), in which he starred as a man in search of his ex-wife and children, was generally given a chilly critical reception. Although he received professional help and was cured of the addiction, he was unemployable in Hollywood. After attending various schools, he entered two universities, Michigan State University, at which he was a football hero, and Hofstra University, Long Island, but failed to graduate from either. (The matter was settled out of court.) Then came the morning when he woke up in a friend’s flat to find 10 Los Angeles policemen standing over him with guns drawn. His defining role came as Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). Caan, who was nominated for an Oscar, was perfect as the hedonistic and volatile heir apparent to the Corleone family, whose bloody ways end in his own death. On another occasion, the FBI intercepted a phone conversation between Fiato and Caan concerning the actor Joe Pesci. Caan asked his friend to “take care” of Pesci after learning about an unpaid $8,000 bill from Pesci’s stay at a friend’s Miami hotel. More violence came his way as the brutal CIA man in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite and, in contrast, he portrayed Billy Rose, the gambling, philandering husband of Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice in Funny Lady, all in the same year.

James Caan, the veteran screen actor known for his work in such films as "The Godfather," "Misery" and "Elf...

"Very sad to hear the news that James Caan has died. "Jimmy was so supportive of Gary Sinise Foundation & my work w/ our veterans. His father was a butcher. I was just locked into that," he said of his performance. So happy I got to know him. Always wanted to be like him.

Al Pacino, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert De Niro lead the tributes to the late Godfather actor.

"A great actor, a brilliant director and my dear friend," he added. "Jimmy was not just a great actor with total commitment and a venturesome spirit, but he had a vitality in the core of his being that drove everything from his art and friendship to athletics and very good times," he said in a statement. Filmmaker Michael Mann, who directed Caan in the 1981 heist thriller Thief, described his death as a "terrible and tragic loss". Joe Mantegna, who appeared in the third film in the Godfather series, paid his respects over Twitter. "One of the great gifts in being part of The Godfather family was becoming friends with James Caan. Rest In Peace Jimmy," he posted. Pacino, who starred as Michael Corleone, described him as a "great actor" and a "dear friend". Speaking of his "fictional brother and lifelong friend", Pacino said: "It's hard to believe that he won't be in the world any more because he was so alive and daring.

To film buffs, James Caan was a screen legend, but to a younger audience he's the grumpy dad from Elf. Here's your guide to his most iconic roles.

But Caan — who actually learned to crack a real safe on his own — carries the film, and often spoke about it as the movie he was most proud of. "There was one guy playing a photographer who had one of those old box cameras and, as I went in there, I grabbed the friggin' thing and I smashed it, literally threw it on the ground," he said. In an interview for the film's 50th anniversary, Caan said he "just let go" and was given "a certain amount of freedom", and it shows.

The late Hollywood legend James Caan, star of The Godfather, has had a superb movie career that extends well beyond his most famous role as Sonny Corleone.

Caan never winks or acts like he’s in a comedy; he’s bewildered and even a little afraid of Buddy and (reasonably) wants nothing to do with him, but once he realizes the truth that he’s his son, he takes him in anyway … and learns to love him, just like the rest of us. “Oh, he’s a fucking wacko!” Caan would later say of von Trier, recalling that his big scene in the car with Kidman required him “sitting in the back of this thing for hours. Lars von Trier’s poisonous diatribe on the hypocrisy of small-town American “values,” Dogville builds to its final revelation, which is that Nicole Kidman’s innocent victim Grace is, in fact, the daughter of a powerful mobster, identified in the credits only as “the Big Man.” When the character arrives, Caan plays him with a mixture of menace and parental tough love — not that he entirely enjoyed the experience of making the film. Of all the gangsters Caan would play after The Godfather, this one is the best. It was a good reminder of the soulfulness he could locate in even the most dishonest of individuals. In this James Gray drama, James Caan starred alongside Mark Wahlberg, who would remake one of Caan’s own films, The Gambler, more than a decade later. (His one Emmy nomination was for this film.) It is virtually guaranteed that an older male member of your family has cried watching Brian’s Song; the one-two punch of this and The Godfather made Caan a huge, huge star. Caan was in Texas for only two weeks to film Wes Anderson’s first movie, and Anderson would later wonder if Caan entirely understood what he was doing there with all those amateurs. (This was an ABC Movie of the Week.) But the power of Piccolo’s friendship with Hall of Famer Gale Sayers (played by Billy Dee Williams), along with the weepie script, won him over, and Brian’s Song was such a hit it was the highest-rated-ever TV movie at the time. What’s heartbreaking about Axel is that he’s smart enough to know better, but what The Gambler illustrates so convincingly is that “knowing better” means nothing to an addict, and Caan captures both the character’s confidence and despair, the roller coaster of emotions that feed him, even if self-destruction is the only possible outcome. Mann brought out a precision in Caan, who got a rare opportunity with Thief to enjoy a star vehicle, one that catered to his steely strengths. Anyone wanting to understand Caan’s appeal should start with Caan’s obvious highlight, 1972’s The Godfather, in which he plays Sonny, the volcanic eldest son in the Corleone family, whose graphic death is one of the most famous and harrowing in all of cinema.