By Sara Bright
There is a statistic in cinema that sounds like a pub quiz lie, except it is verifiably true. John Cazale appeared in exactly five feature films. All five were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Three of them won. No other actor in the history of the medium can make that claim. Not Marlon Brando, not Robert De Niro, not Meryl Streep herself. Just a quiet, lanky Italian-American from Revere, Massachusetts, who spent thirteen years driving a cab and hauling parcels for Standard Oil before Francis Ford Coppola changed his life – and, as it turned out, cinema history – with a single phone call. His is a story we have explored before on these pages, but it bears retelling – not as trivia, but as a case study in what acting can be when it sheds every pretension and aims only for the human.
Cazale died of lung cancer on 13 March 1978, aged forty-two, eight months before The Deer Hunter reached cinemas. He never saw the finished film. He never won an Oscar. He was never even nominated for one. And yet, as the film historian David Thomson once wrote, “It is the lives and works of people like John Cazale that make filmgoing worthwhile.” Last June, Film Forum in New York staged a week-long 90th anniversary tribute screening all five of his films, alongside free showings of Richard Shepard’s 2009 documentary I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale. The sell-out season confirmed what cinephiles have long known: Cazale’s reputation is not shrinking with time. It is growing.
The Thirteen Years Before Fredo
The mythology of John Cazale tends to begin with The Godfather. It should begin earlier. Born on 12 August 1935 to an Irish-American mother and an Italian-American father, Cazale studied drama at Oberlin College and Boston University before gravitating to New York in his mid-twenties. For more than a decade, he worked off-Broadway, earning Obie Awards for productions of Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx and The Line – the former co-starring a young Al Pacino, who would become his lifelong creative partner and closest friend.
Those who saw Cazale on stage in the late 1960s and early 1970s remember a performer of extraordinary sensitivity. “He had a modesty about him, but also a sense of reality, a groundedness about how the world really worked,” Pacino recalled at Film Forum’s tribute. “He seemed to know something about everything.” It was this quality – not glamour, not range in the conventional sense, but an almost uncanny specificity of behaviour – that set Cazale apart from his contemporaries. Gene Hackman, notoriously single-minded about his craft, called him “extremely intense” and “highly concentrated.” Even Hackman, one is tempted to add, was slightly intimidated.
Fredo, and the Art of Being Overlooked
Cazale’s film debut came in 1972 with Coppola’s The Godfather, in which he played Fredo Corleone, the weak-willed middle son passed over in the family’s dynastic succession. Producer Fred Roos had spotted Cazale in the 1971 stage revival of Horovitz’s Line, co-starring Richard Dreyfuss. “There was no hesitation to cast him,” Coppola later said. What could have been a forgettable bit part became the emotional anchor of the Corleone saga. Fredo’s pitiful inadequacy, his desperate need for validation, his ultimate betrayal – Cazale rendered it all with a trembling authenticity that made the character impossible to dismiss.
Coppola was so impressed that he wrote the role of Stan, a jittery surveillance expert, into his next film, The Conversation (1974), specifically for Cazale. That same year, Fredo’s role was substantially expanded for The Godfather Part II, and Cazale delivered what Bruce Fretts of Entertainment Weekly called a performance in which “wounded pride” becomes “hauntingly palpable.” Then came Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), in which Cazale played Sal Naturile, the anxious, sweat-stained bank robber opposite Pacino’s combustible Sonny. He earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor – the sole major individual nomination of his career.
The Monomaniacal Craft
What made Cazale so influential? The answer lies not in his filmography’s statistical improbability but in his working method. Streep described it as “monomaniacal.” Directors, she said, used to call him “Twenty Questions” – “he was never, never, never satisfied with just the outlines of a character or just filling out the expected thing. He would say to me, ‘There’s a lot of other possibilities.'”
This restless interrogation of a role had a galvanising effect on his collaborators. “It was inspiring,” Pacino said of working alongside him. “He did better and better, so you did better and better.” Richard Shepard, director of the 2009 documentary, observed that Cazale was “always in the employment of the moment” – a reactor, not a scene-stealer, who elevated every actor he worked with by the simple act of being fully, unguardedly present. Hackman, who starred with Cazale in The Conversation, acknowledged that Cazale’s “highly concentrated” approach forced him to raise his own game. “He taught me about asking questions and not having to answer them,” Pacino said.
The younger generation absorbed the lesson. Steve Buscemi, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sam Rockwell, and Michael Fassbender have all named Cazale as a formative influence. Hoffman, who died in 2014, once said that watching Cazale’s work was “like watching someone solve a puzzle you didn’t know existed.” The through-line from Cazale’s naturalistic precision to the best American character acting of the past four decades is direct and unmistakable. It is a body of influence built not on quantity but on an intensity that never dissipates – much like the legacy of Edith Piaf, another artist whose brief, incandescent career left a mark far exceeding its duration.
Meryl, Robert, and the Final Film
In the summer of 1976, Cazale played Angelo opposite Meryl Streep’s Isabella in Joseph Papp’s production of Measure for Measure at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. They fell in love during the run and moved in together. Mel Gussow of The New York Times praised Cazale’s “quietly imperious” Angelo, noting that he “sweeps down, vulturelike, to despoil virtue.” Streep, characteristically, offered a more direct assessment: “The jerk made everything mean something.”
When Cazale was diagnosed with lung cancer in May 1977, during the filming of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Streep was at his side. The studio, EMI, wanted him removed from the production. He was uninsurable. Cimino refused. “I was told that unless I got rid of John, they would shut down the picture,” Cimino later recalled. “It was awful. I spent hours on the phone, yelling and screaming and fighting.” Streep threatened to walk. And then Robert De Niro, who wanted Cazale in the film, quietly paid his insurance premium. “That’s what friends do,” De Niro told The Telegraph in 2019, confirming the story for the first time.
All of Cazale’s scenes were filmed first. He was visibly frail. He died on 13 March 1978, in the Manhattan apartment he shared with Streep, who had spent five months accompanying him to chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering, reading him the sports pages in funny voices, performing comedy routines at his bedside. “She took care of him like there was nobody else on earth,” Joseph Papp said. Cazale never saw The Deer Hunter. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
The Eternal Rediscovery
Part of Cazale’s enduring fascination lies in the question of what might have been. Would he have had a De Niro slump? A Pacino period of self-parody? A Streep-like decades-spanning reinvention? We cannot know. What we know is that he gave everything to five films and a body of stage work that, had he lived, would almost certainly have placed him alongside his contemporaries at the summit of American screen acting.
The Brooklyn Rail’s Susanna Maize argued recently that reducing Cazale to a “today I learned” Reddit post – the actor whose every film was a Best Picture nominee – actually obscures the depth that made him great. “By reducing Cazale to a trivia question,” she wrote, “we miss out on the nuance and depth that made him such a great actor.” The Film Forum retrospective, and the continued availability of I Knew It Was You on streaming platforms, offer an antidote: a chance to watch the work itself, unmediated by the statistics.
Cazale never pursued fame. He pursued truth. He pursued it with such ferocity that it left a permanent mark on everyone who witnessed it – and on a art form that is still reckoning with his absence. As Pacino told The New York Times in 2022: “John Cazale, in general, was one of the great actors of our time – that time, any time. I learned so much from him. He was inspiring, he just was.” Four decades on, the inspiration shows no sign of fading.
Read more: The Legendary John Cazale: A Cinematic Legacy Unmatched
