The Jewish actor James Caan, who has died aged 82, was best known for playing an Italian mobster.

His role as Sonny, the impulsive and violent yet charismatic eldest brother in the Corleone clan, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972, came to define him.

Caan was initially cast as the film’s central figure, Michael Corleone, but that role went to Al Pacino because Coppola knew Caan was perfect to play Sonny.

In a long Hollywood tradition of Jews playing Italians and vice versa, Caan threw himself wholeheartedly into the role, supplying many of the film’s most memorable moments from his entrance to his final dying gasps as he was shot to death. He was rewarded with an Academy Award nomination for best-supporting actor.

Caan was so convincing as Sonny that from then on he was often mistaken for Italian and a gangster at that. “I won ‘Italian of the Year’ twice in New York, and I’m not Italian,” he said. He was denied membership in a country club because a board member thought he was “a wise guy…a made guy”.

The Godfather, though, was not Caan’s first role. He had been acting for the stage, on television and in movies since the early 1960s. His first big film role was in the 1964 thriller Lady in a Cage followed by a starring role in Coppola’s The Rain People in 1969.

But it was in the 1970s that his movie career took off.

One year before The Godfather his performance as professional football player Brian Piccolo in the 1971 television movie Brian’s Song earned him an Emmy nomination.

In 1973, he played a love-struck sailor in Cinderella Liberty, a self-destructive professor in The Gambler (1974), an anti-authority athlete in Rollerball (1975), and a World War II sergeant in A Bridge Too Far (1977). With his rugged good looks and acting ability, he was likened to another Jewish actor when, in The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “Caan seems to be shaping up as the Paul Newman of the Nineteen-Seventies.”

Caan amassed scores of credits but apart from The Godfather he was perhaps best known for his roles in Rollerball; Coppola’s 1987 Vietnam War drama Gardens of Stone: a writer held captive by a crazed fan in Rob Reiner’s box-office hit Misery (1990); mobsters in Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) and Mickey Blue Eyes (1999); and an ill-tempered book editor in Elf (2003).

Yet, despite being prolific, many would not have known that Caan was a Jewish actor as he was not known for playing such roles.

Although he began his career by appearing in an off-Broadway production of La Ronde by the Viennese-Jewish playwright, Arthur Schnitzler, similar roles were few and far between.

However, following a trip to Israel in 2016 where he toured Jewish settlements in the West Bank and urged Israel not to return to its pre-1967 borders, he bookended his career playing retired American-Jewish cardiologist Harry Rosenmerck, who leaves New York and his family to raise pigs in Israel in the 2017 comedy, Holy Lands.

Earlier, in 1975 he had played the Jewish impresario Billy Rose alongside Barbra Streisand in 1975’s Funny Lady.

Whether playing Jews or not, Caan had a part in reinventing the image of the Jew on film away from Holocaust victims and nebbish neurotics like those
in which Woody Allen specialised.

In the words of actor and writer Seth Rogen: Caan was “a scary Jew, which is almost unheard of”.

On his own Jewish identity, James Caan said, “I don’t hang around with antisemites if that’s what you mean, and don’t know any and if I did, I’d punch them in the face.”

James Edmund Caan was born in The Bronx, New York. He was one of the three children of German-Jewish immigrants Arthur and Sophie Falkenstein. Arthur was a wholesale dealer and butcher of kosher meat and Sophie was a homemaker. Caan grew up in Sunnyside, Queens.

Tough and physical, he was a poor student, preferring the thrills of street life to education, and dropped out of several establishments before settling down at Rhodes Preparatory School in Manhattan, where he graduated in 1956 at the age of 16.

He later attended Michigan State University where he was a member of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. He hoped to join the football team there. Although he failed, his athleticism and muscular physique would go on to serve him well.

After two years, he transferred to Hofstra University on Long Island where he met Coppola.

Although he did not graduate, dropping out shortly after, it was at Hofstra that his interest in acting was kindled and he went on to study for five years at the well-regarded Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in Manhattan. “I just fell in love with acting”, he later recalled. “Of course all my improvs ended in violence.”

Caan’s first roles were in 1960s television series like Route 66, Dr. Kildare and Wagon Train.
And while he worked steadily in film and television over the next five decades, he never regained the heights of the 1970s.

Caan revelled in his bad-boy image. In interviews, he was known to swear profusely. He was married and divorced four times and enjoyed a lifestyle of, in his words, “girls and drugs and partying”, resulting in a cocaine addiction for which he was treated.

He also managed a boxer, trained as a martial artist and took part in rodeos calling himself the “only Jewish cowboy from New York on the professional rodeo cowboy circuit”. He was friends with mobsters and was once arrested when a rapper accused him of pulling a gun on him.

Caan was married to Dee Jay Mathis from 1961-1966, Sheila Marie Ryan from 1976-1977, Ingrid Hajek from 1990-1995, and Linda Stokes from 1995-2009. Between them, he had five children.

Caan died in Los Angeles and is survived by his brother Ronald; five children, the actor Scott Caan and Tara, Alexander, James and Jacob Caan; and four grandchildren.

James Caan: born March 26, 1940. Died July 6, 2022