He taught Pacino how to act: the brief, brilliant life of Deer Hunter star John Cazale
Where did it come from: that ineffable sadness? This was the question everyone who worked with the great Seventies actor John Cazale eventually came to ponder. Meryl Streep wondered it when she and Cazale, soon to be lovers, met in 1976 on a Central Park production of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure. The idea of Cazale as a perpetually wounded bird haunted Al Pacino, who regarded Cazale as a mentor and big brother.
The same bottomless melancholy fascinated Francis Ford Coppola. It was why he cast the then-unknown Cazale as tragic Fredo Corleone in The Godfather. And it blazed in Cazale’s final performance, opposite Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter in 1978.
Cazale would be claimed by cancer before the Deer Hunter was completed and so never saw the film containing his swansong. It was a miracle he was in it in the first place. So advanced was the disease the producers had blanched at his involvement, fearing the cost of insuring him would be ruinous. It has now emerged that De Niro personally intervened. He paid Cazale’s insurance out of his own pocket so that he could share the screen with an actor widely considered the finest of his generation.
Cazale died in relative obscurity. That was despite his relationship with Streep, who nursed him through his final months and held him as he passed away at 3am at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York in March 1978. He was 42; the cancer had spread to his bones.
But over the past decade or so, the cult of Cazale has flourished. He’s the acting equivalent of that cool indie band none of your friends have heard of, the obscure writer who influenced the best-sellers of his day.
The line of trivia always repeated when his name comes up is that the five movies in which he appeared were all nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. Of those, three – The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and The Deer Hunter – won. The other two, The Conversation and Dog Day Afternoon, should have. (The Conversation ultimately lost out to…The Godfather Part II.)
If he has a claim on Hollywood immortality it is for portraying Fredo, the ethically bankrupt second son in the Corleone clan. Malleable and naive where his younger sibling Michael (Pacino) is inscrutable and ruthless, Fredo was one of cinema’s great moral weaklings. A measure of the shadow cast by the character is that when Donald Trump wanted to insult CNN anchor Chris Cuomo recently he described him as “Fredo”. Some 50 years on, it’s still a name that stings.
“In an Italian family, there are always brothers who are made fun of…. Maybe I was in that category at the time,” said Coppola. “I empathised a little bit with Fredo.”
Cazale wasn’t simply a good judge of material. In an era of acting greats, he was that rare performer who burned slow and let his eyes do the talking. In The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon – in which he was cast just 10 seconds into a line-read with director Sidney Lumet – he simmered as Pacino blazed. As foil to Gene Hackman in The Conversation, he was radiated a stricken intensity. Opposite De Niro in The Deer Hunter his minimalist style conveyed multitudes.
