James Caan obituary — actor who played a memorable role in The Godfather

Best known for his explosive, unpredictable turn as Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and for playing the compulsive, self-destructive Axel Freed in Karel Reisz’s The Gambler (1974), James Caan, who has died at the age of 82, gave the kind of performances that tend to be characterised as “muscular”.

It’s a description which, when used about actors such as John Wayne, his co-star in El Dorado (1966), can be a polite way of saying “macho”. But though he shared conservative political inclinations with Wayne, his acting style was a far more intriguing, complex proposition. At its best, a Caan performance was a lean and unsettling thing, imbued with a quicksilver trickiness and a sense of barely contained threat.

The instinctive and frequently combative quality that Caan brought to the screen was never showcased better than in The Godfather. He later recalled inadvertently upstaging Marlon Brando by grabbing a walnut and fidgeting with it during a particularly weighty monologue. Brando, to his credit, recognised that the distracted walnut fiddling perfectly captured the impetuous quality that made Sonny such a liability.

Elsewhere in the film, there’s a memorable scene in which Sonny, riled by the presence of the FBI outside his sister’s wedding, grabs a camera and smashes it on the floor. It was entirely unscripted: “I didn’t know I was gonna do it. Nobody knew I was gonna do it,” Caan recalled. But it’s what he did next — Sonny reaches into his trouser pocket, pulls out a couple of crumpled bills, and chucks them on the floor — which gives a sense of the codes that allowed Sonny the leeway to vent his monstrous impulses. “Because where I’m from,” Caan later explained, “if you put the money on the ground, it’s OK. You’re forgiven. I paid for it, and forget it.”

Coppola trusted Caan’s instincts because Caan, like Coppola, knew the world in which the story took place. Of blue-collar Jewish immigrant stock — his father was a butcher and meat dealer — he was born in 1940 in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in Sunnyside, Queens. He attended Michigan State University, then transferred to Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, where his classmates included Coppola. It was there that he was first drawn to acting as a career, subsequently enrolling in New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.

The impulsive, disruptive quality that made him such an exciting screen presence was not just visible in his acting. He also brought it to his full-blooded, somewhat truculent approach to life in general. Before he broke through as an actor, he made a living as a rodeo rider, nearly tearing off his thumb in one incident. He boasted of numerous broken bones tacked together with pins; his personal life — he was married four times and had five children — was similarly fractured.

He could be recklessly candid in his appraisal of directors. Lars Von Trier, with whom he worked on Dogville (2003), was “a wacko”; Richard Rush (Freebie and the Bean, 1974) he described as “a pompous ass”; and Alan J Pakula (Comes a Horseman, 1978) was a “phoney”.

Buoyed by the success of The Godfather, Caan’s career was at its peak in the 1970s. But a series of unfortunate decisions meant that he lost momentum. Films that he turned down included M*A*S*H, The French Connection, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Superman (the latter because he couldn’t countenance wearing a cape). His sister’s death from leukaemia, and a tangle with substance abuse, meant that he didn’t work at all from 1982 to 1987.

But in the 1990s he returned to the screen, notably as the bed-bound author who is terrorised by Kathy Bates in Misery (1990). It was an astute piece of casting — taking an actor known for his virile physicality and rendering him immobile for much of the film brought an extra degree of discomfort to an already nerve-shredding picture.

In later life, he became a champion of new talent — he starred in, among others, Wes Anderson’s debut, Bottle Rocket (1996), and James Gray’s second film, The Yards (2000), and he was vocal in his support for younger actors. He also demonstrated a gift for comedy which introduced him to a whole new generation of viewers as Will Ferrell’s naughty-listed biological father in the modern Christmas classic Elf (2003). Caan was resistant to the film’s title, and persuaded the filmmakers to substitute a “k” for the “f” on his copy of the script. “I’ll do Elk, but I will not do Elf,” he said. “It wasn’t one of my great dramatic victories, but I had a great time.”