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    The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

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    Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More

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      Remembering James Caan and His Potent Mix of Swagger and Delicacy

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      “The Godfather” helped open up a range of roles for the actor that allowed him to play against type and expectation in wonderful ways.I’m not sure who owned the book, but eventually it ended up in my sweaty young hands. Someone at school had told me about the scene in Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather,” the one in which Sonny Corleone, the reckless eldest son with a Cupid face and a massive endowment, steals off with one of his sister’s bridesmaids. I remember racing through the passage (“her legs were wrapped around his thighs”). It’s no wonder that when I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s film, I was more than ready for James Caan.He was unforgettably perfect — carnal, wild, exciting. Caan may not be the actor you first think of in relation to “The Godfather,” with its astonishment of legends, but the film is impossible to imagine without his volatile, kinetic performance. Quick to anger, quick to fight, Sonny embodies his family’s terrifying violence in its purest, most unpredictable form, the kind that churns from inside, boiling up like magma. Sonny’s anger will be the death of him; it’s preordained: He must die so that his youngest brother, the deliberate, mercilessly disciplined Michael, can take over the family’s murder business.Not every star finds as perfect a vessel as “The Godfather.” Talent counts, yes, and as an actor, Caan was more gifted and nuanced than suggested by his tough-guy persona. But the vagaries of both life and the movie business mean that few actors and fewer stars have long, creatively unimpeachable runs. Timing also matters as does taste, greed, grit and representation. Caan, who died on Wednesday at 82, has two supreme masterpieces in his filmography: “The Godfather” (1972) and Michael Mann’s “Thief” (1981). We can argue about the sweep of his career, but there’s no debating the greatness that he brought to it.As Sonny, opposite Al Pacino’s more coolheaded Michael, Caan embodied the mob family’s most unpredictable violence.Paramount Pictures, via Associated PressCaan’s career emerged from the ashes of the old studio system. Following what was then a familiar career trajectory, he started in TV before moving into film, and was soon terrifying Olivia de Havilland in the schlocky 1964 thriller “Lady in a Cage.” Looking at the film now (don’t bother), their roles are almost comically emblematic of the era’s upheavals. De Havilland was classical Hollywood personified, an elegant emissary of the old studio system, while Caan would soon be among the upstarts who helped create and define that short-lived, creatively intoxicating miracle known as New Hollywood.“Lady in a Cage” is ridiculous, but it helped set Caan’s career in motion. It would take a while for him to find material worthy of his gift, and the performance is less memorable than his outfit, which includes sandals, a tropical shirt that he later loses, exposing the rug that carpets his torso, and villainy’s de rigueur accessory: a women’s stocking pulled over his face. Notably, he’s also wearing snug-fitting jeans, which, like the sandals, were probably meant to signal his thug’s menacing nonconformity but mostly just draw attention to his body. Tight jeans, as attentive fans know, were a staple of Caan’s onscreen closet.It was Howard Hawks, one of the geniuses of the old studio system, who shortly thereafter set Caan on his way by casting him first in “Red Line 7000” (1965) and then, more important, in “El Dorado,” a western headlined by John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. “I was this little punk working with Wayne and Mitchum,” Caan said later, recalling how, during the shoot, he and Wayne almost got into it on set. Mitchum brokered the peace, and the stars and the film came together beautifully. It opened in 1967, the same year that “Bonnie and Clyde” shook up the industry and audiences, and swept aside old Hollywood with its violence, daring and bad attitude.By the time Caan made “The Godfather,” he had established his range in movies as different as Coppola’s directing debut, “The Rain People” (1969), and the 1971 made-for-TV movie “Brian’s Song,” a wildly popular melodrama in which he played the N.F.L. halfback Brian Piccolo, who died young of cancer. Caan also played a tragic football player in “The Rain People,” about a woman (Shirley Knight) who embarks on one of the era’s existential road trips. En route to self-discovery, she picks up Caan’s Kilgannon, a sweet, guileless, brain-damaged former player whose tragically inapt nickname is Killer.Playing a brain-addled football player opposite Shirley Knight in “The Rain People.”Warner Bros., via AlamyWith his thick neck and trapezoidal torso, Caan looked like the athlete he plays, but little about the performance in “The Rain People” is obvious. It’s a heavy role — Killer is the story’s sacrificial lamb — yet Caan, working with Coppola, imbues the part with a subtle, persuasive innocence that doesn’t patronize the character or sanctify his disability. As an actor, Caan certainly could go big and externalize a character’s inner workings (he does a lot around the eyebrows), and Kilgannon has his outsize moments. Yet what makes the character work is the poignant impassiveness that conveys just how brutally life has hollowed him out.Caan’s ability to convey delicacies of feeling wasn’t a singular gift, but, in his finest roles, it worked contrapuntally with his swaggering physicality and the implied roughness telegraphed by his Bronx-and-Queens-cultivated accent. He sounded like a tough, a delinquent, a bad, potentially dangerous guy, even if his better characters were sometimes more complicated. As Caan’s reputation grew (he was a longtime favorite of this paper’s film critics) and a range of roles opened up to him, he played to and against type and expectation, becoming one of the defining faces of New Hollywood.It may come as a surprise just how big Caan was in the 1970s, particularly if you’re really only familiar with “The Godfather.” Two years after Coppola’s film blew up, in an essay on “The Last Detail” that consecrated Jack Nicholson as a major star, The Times’s Vincent Canby also named Caan as one of the era’s other young notables alongside Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Caan’s frequent co-star, Robert Duvall. There are different reasons Caan’s reputation dimmed in the ensuing decades; for one thing, while Nicholson was solidifying his fame as a sailor in “The Last Detail,” Caan was repping the Navy in “Cinderella Liberty” (1973).I love “Cinderella Liberty,” but it hasn’t been canonized like “The Last Detail,” written by Robert Towne and directed by Hal Ashby. But “Cinderella” deserves love, partly because Caan is terrific in it as a sailor who, during an unplanned leave, suddenly becomes involved with a good-time broad (a glorious Marsha Mason). They’re loose and funny and sexy, and together create a raw, unpredictable, memorable romance. Given how aggressively male-dominated so many 1970s classics were, it’s worth remembering that Caan was good with women in more ways than were hinted at in “The Godfather.”MGM, via AlamyThere are all sorts of reasons the decades that followed were not always kind to Caan, including the end of New Hollywood. He made good and forgettable movies, disappeared, re-emerged and matured into avuncular roles. He was discovered by newcomers like Wes Anderson (“Bottle Rocket”) and Christopher McQuarrie (“The Way of the Gun”). For me, though, the second half of Caan’s career is demarcated by “Thief,” the 1981 thriller in which he plays a master burglar. It’s an action film with guns and violence, blowtorches and lots of tough guys, but because this is quintessential Michael Mann, it’s also a romance.When the film was released, some critics objected to what was seen as its softer, mushier side, which feels like critic-speak for the fact that it features a woman. When Caan’s character isn’t cracking safes or skulls, he is having a tender affair with Tuesday Weld’s skittish restaurant hostess. The two fall in love, have one of Mann’s signature soul-baring conversations across a table and adopt a (stolen) baby. It’s complicated. It’s also beautiful and it gets me every time I watch it. And while the film doesn’t end happily — though maybe it does — it ends happily for any viewer who’s open to it, its deep humanity and to Caan’s transcendent performance. More

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      Best James Caan Movies to Stream

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      Drama, comedy, suspense, action, kids’ movies — there was truly nothing he couldn’t do. Who else could star in both “The Godfather” and “Elf”?When James Caan’s family announced his death on Thursday, it sent shock waves through cinematic circles — not because his passing was particularly premature (he was 82), but because he seemed such a vibrant and outsize personality, you figured he just might live forever.He hadn’t retired, or even slowed down much, in old age. He co-starred (with Ellen Burstyn, Jane Curtin and Ann-Margret) in “Queen Bees” last year and has another film still due out. More than that, he had maintained an active presence on Twitter, frequently sharing images from his films and memories of his collaborators and always concluding his messages with the phrase “End of tweet.”Yet Caan was a series of contradictions: a Jewish actor best known for playing an Italian, a leading man who never quite became a movie star, an actor equally adept at playing strength and weakness, rage and vulnerability. His attack on his abusive brother-in-law in “The Godfather” is one of the most visceral scenes of violence in movie history. But just the year before, he had starred in a film still remembered for its ability to make men cry. We’ll begin our look at his long, varied career there.1971‘Brian’s Song’Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Caan had already banked several years of television work and a handful of juicy film roles (including memorable appearances in Howard Hawks’s “El Dorado” and “Red Line 7000” and Robert Altman’s “Countdown”) when he starred in this “ABC Movie of the Week.” Caan and Billy Dee Williams starred as the real-life Chicago Bears teammates Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers, the first interracial roommates in the history of the N.F.L. and best friends until Piccolo’s untimely death from cancer in 1970. Caan and Williams’s easy rapport sells the relationship, and Caan is truly heartbreaking in the closing scenes, which prove a too-rare showcase for his tenderness and warmth.1972‘The Godfather’Stream it on Paramount+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Caan’s breakthrough role came the following year in Francis Ford Coppola’s sensational adaptation of the best seller by Mario Puzo. The director — who had used Caan to great effect, in a much gentler role, in “The Rain People” (1969) — cast the actor as Sonny, the hot-tempered oldest brother in the Corleone clan. The studio wanted Caan to play Michael (executives didn’t care at all for this Pacino kid Coppola was stuck on), but the filmmaker knew Caan had the mixture of ladies’ man charisma and brute force so essential to Sonny. It was a scene-stealing role, and Caan took advantage of it, playing the character’s many memorable moments to the hilt: his memorable in flagrante delicto entrance, his mocking “bada bing!” moment with Michael, that street-fight humiliation of his brother-in-law and, most of all, his shocking, bullet-ridden last gasps on the Jones Beach Causeway.1974‘The Gambler’Rent or buy it onAmazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.As with most of the actors associated with “The Godfather,” Caan was quickly elevated to leading roles in the wake of its astonishing success. The best of that bunch may well have been this spiky tale of a privileged English professor who finds that his high-society pedigree and formidable intellect are no match for a spiraling gambling addiction. Caan’s duality — his ability to seem to move between worlds, ethnicities and classes — was rarely more effective than here, as his Axel Freed must seem at home both in the classroom, lecturing about the works of Dostoyevsky, and in the back rooms of New York’s seedy gambling underbelly, trying to buy more time from his bookie.1975‘Rollerball’Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, and Vudu.In our current cinematic landscape, an actor who fronts critical successes like “The Godfather” and “The Gambler” is usually ripe for picking by the Superhero Industrial Complex, handed a nice payday and an easy shoot in exchange for lending class and gravitas to a popcorn movie. Caan’s taking the lead in Norman Jewison’s big-budget sports movie could have looked like the same move, downshifting his considerable onscreen intelligence into something a bit brawnier. But “Rollerball” is no typical sports movie. Set in the then-distant future of 2018, it’s a prescient warning of the dangers of corporate overreach, overt violence and class warfare in sports entertainment — and society in general — and Caan conveys both the character’s fierce physicality and his intellect with ease.1981‘Thief’Stream it on Tubi. Rent or buy it on Vudu.Caan turned in arguably his finest performance — and certainly his most soulful — in this astonishing combination of crime movie and middle-age melodrama from the writer-director Michael Mann (“Heat”). Mann specializes in working-class criminals, guys who see their work as a job and nothing more, a way to make a living without punching a clock. Few actors understood that character like Caan, who plays the safecracker, jewel thief and ex-con Frank as a man who will break the law but not his moral code, and who so longs for the fruits of his labor that he carries around a collage of his imagined perfect, suburban life like a mobile vision board. Caan wears the heaviness of the character like a winter coat; he does what he has to do to get by, forever grasping for the last big score that always seems just out of reach.1990‘Misery’Stream it on Showtime. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Caan spent much of the ’80s in a self-imposed exile, burned out from his busy ’70s, battling addictions and caring for his children. He stepped back into the industry with this Rob Reiner adaptation of Stephen King’s best seller, but did so with a generosity of spirit: Rather than choosing a solo vehicle that would show off his gifts, he took the decidedly secondary role of bedridden novelist Paul Sheldon and ceded the spotlight to the relative newcomer Kathy Bates, who had the much showier role of his obsessed superfan Annie Wilkes. She won an Oscar, and thanked him profusely in her acceptance speech: “I really am your No. 1 fan, Jimmy.”1992‘Honeymoon in Vegas’Rent or buy it on Apple TV+; buy it on Amazon.Caan spent the ’90s easing into his new position as a respected character actor, with copious supporting roles both in film and on television. The remnants of Sonny Corleone made him a no-brainer for villain roles, and he played them well, but some of his most memorable work inverted and confounded those expectations. One of the best examples was this romantic comedy from the writer-director Andrew Bergman, starring Nicolas Cage as a newlywed who gambles away a weekend with his wife (Sarah Jessica Parker) to Caan’s high roller. On paper, the character is reprehensible — but Caan invests him with a lovelorn sweetness that lends the picture, and its central conflict, some unexpected ripples.1996‘Bottle Rocket’Stream it on HBO Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Caan may have had visions of John Travolta’s “Pulp Fiction” comeback when he accepted a supporting role in the up-and-coming Wes Anderson’s debut feature, a cockeyed caper picture about a crew of incompetent criminals. It didn’t have the same result — the film didn’t find its audience until years later, after Anderson had established himself — but Caan’s unsung comic side shines in the role of Mr. Henry, an imposing criminal mastermind (and the proprietor of a successful landscaping firm). It was one of his finest late-career performances, deploying his still-potent tough-guy demeanor and undercutting it with unexpected, self-aware wit.2003‘Elf’Stream it on HBO Max. Rent or buy on most major platforms.When you live and work for as long as Caan did, you become beloved by each generation for a different role, and if boomers loved him for “The Godfather” and Gen Xers for “Bottle Rocket,” this smash family comedy endeared him to Generation Z. A lesser actor, cast in the role of the father to the North Pole elf Buddy (Will Ferrell), might’ve winked or mugged and ruined the whole thing; Caan wisely played this harried dad close to the bone, keenly aware that the straighter his face, the funnier his scenes. Drama, comedy, suspense, action, kids’ movies — there was truly nothing James Caan couldn’t do. More

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      James Caan, Actor Who Won Fame in ‘The Godfather,’ Dies at 82

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      A Bronx native, he starred in countless movies and TV shows, but was most closely identified with the volatile character Sonny Corleone.James Caan, who built a durable film career in varied roles across six decades but was forever identified most closely with one of his earliest characters, the quick-tempered, skirt-chasing Sonny Corleone in the original “Godfather” movie, died on Wednesday. He was 82. His death was announced by his family on Twitter and confirmed by his manager, Matt DelPiano. Both his family and his manager declined to say where he died or cite a cause.By the time “The Godfather” was released in 1972, Mr. Caan had established himself as a young actor worth keeping an eye on. He had a meaty role in “El Dorado,” a 1966 western that starred John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. (Wayne, Mr. Caan said, cheated at chess games during breaks in the filming.)In “The Rain People,” a 1969 movie that was his first collaboration with the director Francis Ford Coppola, he earned critical praise playing a simple-minded former football player.“Brian’s Song” (1971), an early made-for-television movie, brought him to the attention of a wider audience. Based on a true story, it focused on the friendship between a Black football star, Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears (played by Billy Dee Williams), and a white teammate, Brian Piccolo. Piccolo died of cancer in 1970 at 26, and Mr. Caan played him with verve and humor in an unabashedly three-hanky film.Then came Mr. Coppola’s “Godfather.” Initially cast as the central figure, Michael Corleone — the role ultimately played by Al Pacino — Mr. Caan ended up playing Sonny, quick to anger and ultimately gunned down on a causeway. He threw himself into the role so fully that for years, he said, strangers would say things to him like “Hey, don’t go through that tollbooth again.”Some even mistook him for a real mobster. “I’ve been accused so many times,” he told Vanity Fair in 2004. “I won ‘Italian of the Year’ twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.”He was in fact Jewish, reared in Sunnyside, Queens, by German-born parents. “I was denied in a country club once,” he said. “Oh, yeah, the guy sat in front of the board and he says, ‘No, no, he’s a wiseguy, been downtown. He’s a made guy.’ I thought, ‘What, are you out of your mind?’ ”Mr. Caan received an Emmy nomination for best actor for “Brian’s Song” and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for “The Godfather.” His Oscar competition included Mr. Pacino and another “Godfather” actor, Robert Duvall. The three canceled one another out, and the award went to Joel Grey for “Cabaret.”Mr. Caan’s performance as the pro football player Brian Piccolo in the 1971 television movie “Brian’s Song” earned him an Emmy nomination.ABCBy then, Mr. Caan’s career had kicked into high gear. The decade that followed was especially fertile. Among his roles were a love-struck sailor in “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), a self-destructive professor in “The Gambler” (1974), an anti-authority athlete in “Rollerball” (1975), a fierce World War II sergeant in “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) and a not-too-bright ex-con in “Thief” (1981), a favorite movie of his.Not all his films received favorable notices, but with his rugged good looks and obvious smarts, his acting usually did. Reviewing “Cinderella Liberty” for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “Mr. Caan seems to be shaping up as the Paul Newman of the nineteen-seventies. An intelligent, versatile actor with a low-key but unmistakable public personality.”Like Paul Newman, Mr. Caan tried his hand at directing. But he did so only once, with “Hide in Plain Sight” (1980), in which he also acted, playing a man searching for his children after they and their mother are brought into the government’s witness-protection program. The film fared poorly at the box office and left him disenchanted.“Everybody wants to do ‘Rocky 9’ and ‘Airport 96’ and ‘Jaws 7,’ ” he said in 1981. “And you look and you listen, and what little idealism you have left slowly dwindles.”Mr. Caan with the actress Lilyan Chauvin, left, and his wife at the time, the actress Sheila Ryan, at a movie preview in 1975.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his prime, Mr. Caan had a man’s-man reputation that he savored. In interviews, he strewed four-letter words like birdseed. He earned a sixth-degree black belt in karate. He roped steers on the rodeo circuit and managed a boxer — pursuits, especially rodeo, that left him with so many stitches and screws in his shoulders and arms that the sportswriter Jim Murray once said, “Jimmy Caan was not born, he was embroidered.”Mr. Caan also had a bad-boy reputation. He was married and divorced four times. He appeared as a character witness for an old friend from Queens who was on trial as a mobster because, he said, stand-up guys stay loyal to their pals. And he had his own brushes with the law.The police questioned him at length in 1993 after a man fell to his death from the fire escape of a Los Angeles apartment where Mr. Caan was staying. The authorities concluded that the death was accidental, and Mr. Caan said he was asleep when it occurred.The next year the North Hollywood police arrested him after he flashed a loaded pistol in public. He said he had done it only to break up a fight. The charges were dropped.Along the way, he checked into a rehab center for an addiction to cocaine that began after his sister, Barbara Licker, died of leukemia in 1981. The two of them had been close — she was president of a movie production company that included James and their brother, Ronald — and her death hit him hard.He barely worked for the next six years and wound up deep in debt. “I got into the whole lifestyle of girls and drugs and partying,” he told Entertainment Weekly, adding that “you really do get caught up in it, and it’s very destructive.”Mr. Caan in a scene from another of his best-known films, “Misery” (1990), in which he played a writer held captive by a crazed fan.Columbia Pictures/Getty ImagesBut he bounced back, starting in 1987 with the Vietnam War drama “Gardens of Stone,” another collaboration with Mr. Coppola, in which he played a tough sergeant. He then took on roles including a writer held captive by a crazed fan (played by Kathy Bates) in the box-office hit “Misery” (1990), directed by Rob Reiner and based on a novel by Stephen King; a tough but romantic mob guy in “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992); yet another mobster in the comedy “Mickey Blue Eyes” (1999); and a cantankerous book editor in “Elf” (2003).He also turned to television, notably the series “Las Vegas,” on which he was seen from 2003 to 2007 as the president of operations and security chief for a casino. Still, though he worked steadily, his later career lacked the incandescence of his earlier years.Born on March 26, 1940, in the Bronx, James Edmund Caan grew up in Queens, the son of Arthur Caan, a wholesale dealer of kosher meat, and Sophie (Falkenstein) Caan, a homemaker.Street life held his interest more than classrooms did. He dropped out of several schools before settling down at Rhodes Preparatory School in Manhattan, where he graduated in 1956 at age 16.At Michigan State University, he hoped to make the football team but failed. He switched to Hofstra University on Long Island — Mr. Coppola was a classmate — but dropped out before long. Nonetheless, his interest in acting was kindled there. He went on to study for five years at the well-regarded Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in Manhattan.Mr. Caan at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2010.Hugh Hamilton for The New York TimesAt around that time he met an actress named Dee Jay Mathis, who became the first of his four wives (the lengths of his marriages ranged from 12 years to barely a year). He is survived by his brother, Ronald; five children, the actor Scott Caan and Tara, Alexander, James and Jacob Caan; and four grandchildren. Mr. Caan’s early work included roles in 1960s television series like “Route 66,” “Dr. Kildare” and “Wagon Train.” Movies soon loomed, with “The Godfather” dominant.In that film, he said, he had improvised some of his lines and actions, including two words that he did not invent but that he ushered into the vernacular. Sonny tells Michael how hard it will be to kill the family’s enemies: “You gotta get up like this and — bada bing! — you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.”“Bada bing? Bada boom? I said that, didn’t I?” Mr. Caan said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “Or did I just say bada bing? It just came out of my mouth. I don’t know from where.” More