James Caan, who captivated audiences with his electric Academy Award-nominated performance in 1972's The Godfather as Sonny Corleone, the oldest son of Vito Corlene and Vito's doomed successor as the head of the Corleone crime family, before continuing a long and varied career in movies and TV, including a beloved turn as the father of a boy raised as a North Pole elf in Will Ferrell 2003 Christmas classic, Elf, has died at the age of 82.

Born and raised in New York City, Caan originally went to Michigan State University to play football. However, two years in he returned to the East Coast and attended Hofstra University, where one of his classmates was a burgeoning filmmaker named Francis Ford Coppola. While at Hofstra, Caan began acting and dropped out of college to study acting at New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.

Caan began to get roles in small, Off-Broadway productions before getting his first Broadway lead in 1961's Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole, written by two young playwright brothers, Bob and William Goldman. William Goldman, of course, later became an iconic screenwriter whose path would cross with Caan again many times over the years.

Just like today, the theater community found work doing television work at the New York City-based TV production houses and Caan was no exception, doing guest spots in numerous TV series of the era. Caan later recalled that he was even offered his own TV series around 1965, which he turned down, explaining, "I want to be an actor not a millionaire."

Caan slowly began to get roles in major motion pictures, but sadly, almost all of his films, while critically acclaimed, did poorly at the box office, despite being cast by such major directors as Howard Hawks, Robert Altman and his old college classmate, Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola cast Caan as a brain-damaged football player in 1969's The Rain People. Caan at least had one major hit during this period. While his starring turn in Hawks' race car driver film, Red Line 7000, flopped in 1965, Hawks liked him enough to give him a supporting role in Hawks' blockbuster John Wayne Western, El Dorado, in 1966. In general, though, by the end of the decade, Caan's star prospects looked grim. He once recalled, "No one would put me in a movie. They all said, 'His pictures never make money.'"

His career got a boost with his Emmy-nominated role as the doomed football player, Brian Piccolo, in the beloved TV movie, Brian's Song, co-starring Billy Dee Williams as Piccolo's friend and teammate on the Chicago Bears, Gale Sayers. Caan didn't want to return to TV, but he loved the script and eventually agreed to do it. It was a smash success and Caan started to get film offers once more.

Coppola cast Caan as Michael Corleone, the youngest Corleone brother who turned out to be the true successor to his father's mantle in The Godfather. Caan, though, wanted to play the eldest brother, Sonny, the quick-tempered son whose fiery ways brings him to an untimely ending. Coppola, also, preferred a less well-known actor, Al Pacino, for Michael and eventually Caan and Coppola were able to convince the studio to let Pacino have Michael and give Caan the role of Sonny (despite another actor, Carmine Caridi, already having the role of Sonny at the time). The Godfather was a blockbuster, and it turned all the actors involved in the film, as well as its director, Coppola, into major stars. However, it also had the side effect of causing Caan to be forever associated with the mob for the rest of his life. He would joke, "They called me a wiseguy. I won Italian of the Year twice in New York, and I'm Jewish, not Italian."

Now a major film star, Caan struggled throughout the rest of the 1970s, as he had to balance the pressure to do "commercial" films with his preference to do well-made, less commercial fare. Examples of the former during the decade included the science fiction sports film, Rollerball, and the mercenary action film, The Killer Elite (Caan reunited with one of his Godfather co-stars, Robert Duvall), both released in 1975, while examples of the latter included 1973's The Gambler, as a professor who gets addicted to gambling, and the French Western, Another Man, Another Chance in 1978.

Caan also had a hit as the main romantic lead in Barbra Streisand's 1975 smash, Funny Lady (a sequel to her first big movie hit, 1968's Funny Girl), and he reunited with screenwriter William Goldman in the star-studded war film, A Bridge Too Far, in 1977 (as a staff sergeant who forces a surgeon at gunpoint to operate on his seemingly dead Captain. As it turns out, the captain was still barely alive and was saved).

Caan gave an acclaimed performance in 1981's Thief, the feature film debut of writer/director Michael Mann, but it was not a commercial success. During the late 1970s/early 1980s, Caan was mostly known for the major roles he didn't take, like the leads in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Kramer vs. Kramer, Apocalypse Now, Superman and Blade Runner.

After his sister's tragic death from leukemia in 1982, Caan quit acting for five years due to depression, "Hollywood burnout" and a drug problem. As he later recalled, "It wasn't that I did bad pictures. I just banished myself for a while." During this period, he tried to do the action thriller, The Holcroft Covenant, in 1985, but he walked off the production mid-shoot, forcing the film to bring in Michael Caine to replace him. As a result, when he was ultimately forced by his dwindling financial resources to get back into acting, he found his salaries lower and having to put up a bond to the insurance companies to be allowed to be in films. It was his old friend, Coppola, who gave him his first new role in 1987's Gardens of Stone.

Luckily, his 1988 film, Alien Nation, which saw him play a cop partnered with an alien, was a big hit, and he began to get more steady work again. He reunited with Goldman in the Rob Reiner film adaptation of Stephen King's Misery, in 1990, with Kathy Bates winning an Academy Award as the crazed fan who takes her favorite author (played by Caan) hostage, breaking his feet so that he could not leave his bed. The film was a critical and commercial success and Caan was back to working regularly as a film actor, including acclaimed performances as a gangster in 1992's Honeymoon in Vegas, and as a college football coach in 1995's The Program.

In 2003, Caan had a big year, as he played the estranged father of Will Ferrell's boy who was raised as an elf in the North Pole in the hit Christmas comedy, Elf. For an actor like Caan who had been so associated with The Godfather his whole career, a new generation of young fans now knew him primarily as the dad in Elf. At the same time, he took his first regular TV series role as the head of the casino on the hit drama, Vegas. However, even later in his life, Caan just couldn't stick with a TV schedule, and left the series after four seasons to concentrate on his film work. Caan continued to act regularly right up until his death on July 6th, 2022, with the actor having been set to appear in an upcoming Francis Ford Coppola movie, Megalopolis, which would have been his fifth film with his old friend.

Caan is survived by five children, including his eldest son, Scott Caan, an accomplished film and TV actor, himself.