Though he sought satisfaction in extreme sports, drugs and a colourful personal life. However, the many superb portrayals he gave in scores of films and TV episodes will outlive the gossip and sensational headlines. His defining role came as Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Caan, who was nominated for an Oscar, was perfect as the hedonistic and volatile heir apparent to the Corleone family, whose bloody ways end in his own death. Soon after The Godfather, Caan was wallowing in violence again as the embittered hero of Rollerball. Although presented as the moral centre of the film, Caan’s character, is as sadistic as everyone else around him. More violence came his way as the brutal CIA man in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite and, in contrast, he portrayed Billy Rose, the gambling, philandering husband of Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice in Funny Lady, all in the same year.

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