James Caan (1940-2022)
The actor James Caan is dead. Caan was best known to adult audiences for portraying Sonny Corleone in "The Godfather" and other notable roles in "Misery" and "Elf". He was 82 years old when he died, as confirmed by his family via his verified Twitter account.
He was born in 1940 in the Bronx, New York. His parents were Jewish immigrants. He played football at Michigan State and later began his acting studies as a student at Hofstra University, where future "Godfather" director Francis Ford Coppola was one of his classmates. Before heading to Los Angeles in the early 1960s to launch a film career, Caan appeared in a few plays on and off-Broadway. He met Coppola, giving him one of his first roles as a troubled drifter in the 1969 drama "The Rain People".
Caan would not find fame in his acting career until 1971. He played Chicago Bears halfback Brian Piccolo in the widely-seen TV movie "Brian's Song". The year after, Caan's next film that made him a star was "The Godfather". Although he wasn't Italian, Caan portrays the hotheaded Sonny Corleone, the eldest son of mobster Don Vito Corleone, famously gunned down by rival gangsters in an ambush at the toll booth. This performance earned Caan an Oscar nomination. He also appeared in a flashback in "The Godfather: Part II".
The versatile actor was known for playing tough-guy characters in movies like "Rollerball" and "Thief" while showing vulnerability in films like "Misery", the 1990 Stephen King adaptation about a mild-mannered romance novelist held captive by an obsessive fan. Even in younger audiences, he was best known as Will Ferrell's Scrooge-like father, a workaholic children's book publisher in 2003's Elf. Caan's other movies include the Howard Hawks western "El Dorado", "The Gambler", "Dick Tracy", "Eraser", and Richard Attenborough's ensemble World War II epic "A Bridge Too Far". Caan has also appeared on television in the drama "Las Vegas" and the rebooted "Hawaii Five-0" series with his son Scott Caan. More recently, he got played by actor Damian Conrad-Davis in "The Offer", a miniseries for Paramount+ that details the making of "The Godfather".
According to IMDb, Caan's last movie role will be in the action-crime-thriller "Fast Charlie" in 2023, which is currently in post-production.
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