Godfather star James Caan dies at the age of 82
The actor assumed to be Italian was the son of a kosher butcher and proud to be Jewish
Brigit Grant is the Jewish News Supplements Editor
James Caan, one of the leading movie stars of the 1970s has died at the age of 82. The actor whose most famous role was as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather was the son of a German Jewish kosher butcher, but was twice honoured as New York City’s “Italian of the Year.”
Born in the Bronx in New York, Caan worked for his father occasionally, but avoided the trade by going to Michigan State University, where he was a member of the Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. But it was at Hofstra University on Long Island, where he became friends with fellow undergraduate Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather.
The mafia movie about the Coreleone family has just been remastered to celebrate its 50th anniversary was voted the greatest film of all time, but it set Caan up with a career of confusion as he was thought to be Italian.
Some of Caan’s other notable performances were in Misery, the adaptation of the Stephen King novel in which he played the author taken hostage by Kathy Bates and as Barbra Streisand’s love interest in Funny Lady , the sequel to Funny Girl.
At the age of 77, the actor who was married four times and had four children, starred in Holy Lands as a Jewish doctor who moves from New York to Israel, where he starts a pig farm in Nazareth. In real-life Caan had visited Israel, a year earlier where he was asked if anyone had ever questioned his support of the country.
His reply – “I don’t hang around with antisemites if that’s what you mean, and I don’t know any. If I did, I’d punch them in the face,” -suggests that the Jewish star was more mafiosa than he realised.
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