The actor, spotted by Howard Hawks who entrusted him with a role in “Red Line”, and subscribed to hyperactive characters, died at the age of 82 years.
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by James Caan, we remember death first. Not the one who has just taken the American actor on July 6 in Los Angeles, at the age of 82, but that, magnificent, furious, which he gave to the character of Sonny in the godfather (1972) by Francis Ford Coppola. Crusted with bullets at the gates of a motorway toll, his body collapsed in apotheosis, in a rough and splendid twist, memorable as every time an actor manages to portray the supreme moment.
By its athletic build, its hairy and well -soaked masculinity, its square face, all protruding jaws, its liveliness of a game covering bursts of brutality, Caan was in line with a James Cagney, who too, In the skin of a gangster, had been able to die in an incredible crash at the end of hell is his own (1949, Raoul Walsh). Knowing how to go up in smoke is not given to everyone.
Child of the Bronx, James Caan, known as “Jimmy”, was born in New York on March 26, 1940, from a family of German Jewish immigrants, son of a kosher butcher without a store who transbahu the districts of meat on the back of his van. He makes a brief detour to the university, where he shares the same benches as the young Coppola, who becomes his friend, practices all kinds of extreme sports, from the rodeo to karate, but mainly catches the theater virus.
Beginnings in Off-Broadway 2>
In 1960, he enrolled in the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of the Theater, Dramatic Art School of New York, and followed the lessons of Sanford Meisner, author of a method focusing on the instinct and spontaneity of the actor. He made his debut in the Off-Broadway and, like many actors of his generation, combines appearances in episodes of television series (the Incorruptibles, the young Doctor Kildare, route 66, Alfred Hitchcock present). He accesses the film sets under the side of figuration, then small roles: he is seen fleetingly, here as a sailor in Irma the sweet (1963) by Billy Wilder, there by juvenile delinquent in a woman in a cage (1964 ) of Walter Grauman.
He is a great master of the classic then finishing Hollywood, Howard Hawks, who spots him and sets him foot in the stirrup, by entrusting him with the main role of car pilot in Line Rouge 7000 ( 1965), a resounding flop (whose actor will have a deplorable memory), then of a young Malibin in the late western El Dorado (1966), between John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. Three years later, his comrade Coppola entrusted him in the people of the rain (1969) a very beautiful supporting role, that of an ex-player of football with a burned brain, that a woman drifting takes to hitchhike Middle -to -his way. However, it is a TV movie who assumed his notoriety, Brian’s Song (1971), where he interpreted another footballer, this time suffering from terminal cancer.
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