James Caan became one of Francis Ford Coppola’s favorite actors in the 1960s. The actor’s addiction led to his five-year break from Hollywood. As Caan recalled in a 2021 interview with The Independent, in the early 1980s he started using cocaine, which he compared to a death sentence. He admitted that “it took a while.”
James Caan thought he was fooling his son. “He witnessed a lot of things I would rather not have done.”
During his break from acting, Caan coached his son’s Little League baseball team. He returned to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1987 film Gardens of Stone. – I had great, really great times as a Little League coach – he told Esquire in 2003, adding:
People were talking about me quitting acting and asking, ‘What about your creativity?’ The job of a coach is creative because you can take a kid who thinks he’s not good and change his mind in four minutes. And I didn’t have to wait six months for them to add music to it.
A year later, he wrote in “Cigar Aficionado” that coaching his son’s team was the best point in the worst period of his life. It was when he realized that Scott was aware of his addiction that James Caan decided to quit drugs. – I thought I was fooling my son. I was so stupid, said the actor. – I didn’t think he knew what was going on. You think kids aren’t smart enough. But that basically woke me up. Scott tackled some guy – he was 15, 16 years old – with a baseball. He wanted to kill him. A drug dealer. My son! It’s like crying with one eye and smiling with the other, you know? It was like a rude awakening, he added.
Scott, born in 1976, has repeatedly called his father the greatest actor of his time, but he also said: “To say our relationship wasn’t dysfunctional would be a lie.” Raised by his mother, model Sheila Ryan, after his parents separated when he was a child, Scott “witnessed a lot of things I’d rather not do,” James in 2010, referring to his time with addiction. “We’re really best buddies now,” he added.
Scott Caan is also an actor
The actor became addicted to cocaine after the death of his younger sister Barbara in 1981 from leukemia. – When I lost her, I couldn’t cope with it. I didn’t know what to do – in a 2021 interview with CBS Sunday Mornings. In turn in “The Independent”:
Barbara was like my best friend. She was the only person I was afraid of in the world. When she died, passion became everything to me. That’s what I loved about my sister: she was just so passionate about everything she did.
Caan, who , had five children. Scott is also an actor, he played, among others, in the series “Hawaii Five-0”. In 2010, he told People that although he witnessed his father’s failures as a child, he did not hold any grudge against him. “He made mistakes that affected him – and me – but he was always there for me no matter what,” he said.
After his father’s death, he recalled the best advice he received from him: “Keep your head down when hitting the ball on the ground” – he referred to sports, and then: When I was three or four years old, he used to say: “If someone does something you don’t like, likes it, ask him not to do it once, and if he does it again, you can hit him.” That was his advice.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
