John Cazale

John Cazale: Five Films, Five Best Pictures

He made exactly five feature films. Every one of them was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He was never nominated himself, and he was dead at forty-two. No other actor in the history of American cinema has a filmography like it, and the reason is not luck: the directors who used John Cazale — Coppola three times, Lumet, Cimino — were the people making the best films of the 1970s, and they kept coming back to the same nervous, balding, sad-eyed man who could not carry a picture and could not be cut from one either.

Winchester, Massachusetts

John Holland Cazale was born on 12 August 1935 in Revere, Massachusetts, the son of John Joseph Cazale and Cecilia Holland, and grew up in Winchester with an older sister, Catherine, and a younger brother, Stephen. He attended the Buxton School in Williamstown, where he joined the drama club, then studied drama at Oberlin College in Ohio before transferring to Boston University to train under Peter Kass.

Cabs, Cameras and Off-Broadway

He drove a cab while starting out, beginning his professional stage career at the Charles Playhouse in Boston in 1959 in *Hotel Paradiso* and *Our Town*; one critic called his performance "absolutely stupendous, hilarious, touching, thrilling." In New York he worked as a photographer while pursuing acting. The breakthrough came Off-Broadway in 1968 in two Israel Horovitz plays, *The Indian Wants the Bronx* and *Line*, which brought him two Obie Awards for Distinguished Performance. He worked repeatedly with the Long Wharf Theatre Company, in *Tartuffe*, *The Iceman Cometh* and *You Can't Take It With You* among others. In 1976 he played *Measure for Measure* at the Delacorte with Sam Waterston and Meryl Streep. His only Broadway appearance — and his last stage performance — was the title role in *Agamemnon* at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on 29 April 1977.

Fredo

The casting director Fred Roos saw him in *Line* at the Theatre De Lys in 1971 and recommended him to Francis Ford Coppola. So Cazale's feature debut, in 1972, was as Fredo Corleone in *The Godfather*, sharing a screen with Marlon Brando, one of his idols. The part was small. The performance was not: Fredo is the family's structural weakness made visible, and Cazale played weakness as something active and painful rather than merely absent. In *The Godfather Part II* (1974) the role expanded enormously, and the critic Bruce Fretts noted that "Cazale makes his character's wounded pride hauntingly palpable." Almost fifty years of American screen acting have been unable to improve on Fredo as a portrait of the sibling who knows exactly what he is not.

Stan and Sal

Coppola was impressed enough to write the role of Stan in *The Conversation* (1974) specifically for him, opposite Gene Hackman. The following year he reunited with Al Pacino for Sidney Lumet's *Dog Day Afternoon*, as Salvatore Naturile, the bank robber's silent, doomed accomplice, and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor, losing to Richard Benjamin for *The Sunshine Boys*. Lumet's observation about what Cazale brought is the most precise description of him on record: "He had a tremendous sadness about him ... it's there — every shot of him."

The Deer Hunter

In 1977 Cazale was diagnosed with lung cancer, likely related to chain smoking, and it spread to his bones. He was cast as Stan Stosh in Michael Cimino's *The Deer Hunter* and insurance complications immediately threatened to remove him. Cimino rearranged the shooting schedule so that all of Cazale's scenes were filmed first. According to Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro paid Cazale's medical insurance costs so that he could take part. He completed every scene. The film was released in 1978, after his death, and won Best Picture.

Meryl

During the summer 1976 run of *Measure for Measure* at the Delacorte, Cazale began a relationship with Streep, then a recent Yale drama graduate; they moved in together. Her tribute to his method is affectionately exasperated: "The jerk made everything mean something ... Such good judgment, such uncluttered thought!" She was at his bedside throughout his illness and with him when he died at around 3 a.m. on 13 March 1978 in New York City. Pacino, who watched it happen, said: "I've hardly ever seen a person so devoted to someone who is falling away like John was. To see her in that act of love for this man was overwhelming."

Why John Is Called a Genius

The case for Cazale is a case about a specific and unfashionable form of intelligence: the ability to make a supporting character the emotional load-bearing wall of a film without ever competing for the frame. He was, by all accounts, often shy and very emotionally sensitive, and he converted that temperament into a technique — playing men who are being outclassed by the people around them, and finding in that humiliation something exact rather than pitiable. Lumet's "tremendous sadness ... every shot of him" describes a quality that cannot be manufactured on demand; Streep's "uncluttered thought" describes the choices that surrounded it, which could.

His peers used the strongest language available. Al Pacino, who worked with him six times across three films and three stage productions, said: "All I wanted to do was work with John for the rest of my life. He was my acting partner," and later: "John Cazale was one of the great actors of our time — that time, any time ... He was in five films, all Oscar-nominated films, and he was great in all of them." Joseph Papp called him "an amazing intellect, an extraordinary person and a fine, dedicated artist." Israel Horovitz's eulogy in the *Village Voice* on 27 March 1978 put it as an epitaph: "John Cazale happens once in a lifetime. He was an invention, a small perfection."

The honest counter-case is about sample size, and it cuts both ways. Five films is not a body of work in the usual sense; it is a fragment, and the perfect Best Picture record owes as much to the directors who hired him as to anything he did. He was never nominated for an Academy Award, never carried a film, and the myth has grown partly because an early death forecloses the possibility of a bad decade. But the argument for him does not depend on volume. Watch Fredo in the boathouse or Sal in the bank and the case makes itself in a few minutes of screen time.

Legacy

He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden, Massachusetts. Horovitz dedicated his "Wakefield Plays" cycle to his memory. The McGinn/Cazale Theater in New York, co-named for Cazale and the actor Walter McGinn, was dedicated on 12 March 1984. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell and Michael Fassbender have all named him an influence, and Richard Shepard's 2009 documentary *I Knew It Was You*, screened at Sundance, gathered Pacino, Streep, De Niro, Hackman, Richard Dreyfuss, Coppola, Lumet and Buscemi to say so on camera. The critic David Thomson supplied the final verdict: "It is the lives and works of people like John Cazale that make filmgoing worthwhile."