Content area
Full Text
"Caan in drug clinic." "Caan accused of beating model." "Caan quizzed over death plunge." "Caan stands bail in Mafia case." "Caan struggles for cash." Trawl through James Caan's cuttings from the last 10 years and these are the headlines that leap out alongside the assorted stories about cocaine addiction and his friendship with Hollywood madam, Heidi Fleiss.
The 60-year-old Bronx-born actor always seems to be caught in the eye of some storm or other. The turbulence extends to his best-known movie characters. Either he's being pounded by mastodon-like lunks on roller skates (Rollerball), in thrall to loan sharks (The Gambler), being shot to pieces at a toll booth (The Godfather), or having Kathy Bates attend to his leg with a saw (Misery).
Given the battering that he has received on and off camera, Caan is remarkably well-preserved. "You look great," a photographer tells him with a hint of surprise in her voice. "Oh, it's all make-up," He speaks in a wise- cracking New York drawl. "You know the old saying, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Bullshit! It makes them think you're dead," he roars when invited to contemplate the long lull in his career in the mid-Eighties while he recovered from drug addiction. "I've been working a lot lately, but it took a while."
He reacts with cheerful stoicism to the inevitable questions about Sonny Corleone. It's not just journalists who are obsessed by a part he played almost 30 years ago. Hollywood casting agents are just as bad. "If it was up to them, I'd be playing Sonny Corleone my entire life," he sighs. "Usually, if there weren't eight people dead by page 11, they wouldn't send me the script. People say, `Gee, you do a lot of mafia movies.' I think I've done two, out of 60."
For Caan, The Godfather represents a lost golden age. Back in the halcyon Seventies, before effects-driven movies and sci-fi spectaculars clouded the scene, actors were allowed to be actors. Studio bosses cared about making movies. It's a familiar thesis, rehearsed at great length in Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, but Caan is talking from first- hand experience. He sounds a little...