John Cazale

John Cazale is the only actor in the history of cinema whose every movie in his career was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. He starred in five films in seven years before his death from cancer at age 42. They represent some of the greatest works in 1970s cinema: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter. Best known as the weak-willed Fredo Corleone in the Godfather series, Cazale played offbeat everyman types and “black sheep” characters with subtlety, humor, and depth. Of his talent and impact, British film critic and historian David Thomson once wrote, “It is the lives and work of people like John Cazale that make filmgoing worthwhile.”

Early life and theater roles

Cazale was born in Revere, Massachusetts, to John Joseph Cazale, a wholesale coal salesman, and Cecilia (née Holland) Cazale, a homemaker. He was the middle child of three siblings. Cazale studied at Oberlin College in Ohio and Boston University (Bachelor of Fine Arts, 1959), where his acting classmates included Olympia Dukakis. He and Dukakis were among the founding members of the Actors Company, a group that started out by performing in a loft on Charles Street in Boston; the company’s founding planted the seeds for what would become the city’s Charles Playhouse.

After graduating, Cazale moved to New York City. He appeared in regional theater productions and found roles in Off-Broadway plays. In 1962 he played a beatnik in the short film The American Way. In the meantime he supported himself working as a cab driver, a photographer, and a messenger for Standard Oil, where he befriended another aspiring actor, Al Pacino. Cazale’s big break came when he and Pacino were cast in Israel Horovitz’s play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Cazale played the title character, an older man who becomes lost in Manhattan and is harassed by two young toughs, one of whom was portrayed by Pacino. The production won several Obie Awards in 1968, including one for Cazale for distinguished performance.

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It was one of two Obies that he received that year, the second being for his performance as the opportunist Dolan in Horovitz’s Line (1967), an absurdist one-act play about five people waiting in line for an unspecified event. In 1971 he reprised his role in an Off-Broadway revival costarring Richard Dreyfuss and Barnard Hughes.

Playing Fredo in the Godfather series

During the revival production of Line, Cazale came to the attention of a producer working with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who cast him as Fredo, the middle son of the Mafia don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Cazale’s feature film debut, The Godfather reunited him with Pacino in a cast that included Marlon Brando, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, and Talia Shire. As the insecure, buffoonish Fredo who is overshadowed by his brothers—the hotheaded Sonny (Caan) and the cold and controlling Michael (Pacino)—Cazale portrayed a type that he would soon excel at. The New Yorker’s Jackson Arn described Cazale’s specialty as “people who are weak, weird, unprincipled, and visibly uncomfortable in their own skins.”

In The Godfather: Part II (1974), however, Fredo comes to the foreground, having grown increasingly resentful of Michael’s power in the Corleone family’s empire. His betrayal leads to two of the most memorable scenes of Cazale’s career and the Godfather series: Michael’s confrontation of Fredo at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Havana (featuring the immortal line “I know it was you, Fredo”) and Fredo’s pathetic pleading with Michael for respect (“I’m your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over!”). As Thomson noted of Cazale’s character, “the climax of the family story…depends on Fredo.” (Thomson also called Fredo “the only hope in that terrible family.”) Variety magazine’s review of The Godfather: Part II singled out Cazale for his “wonderful depth” in the role.

The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and romance with Meryl Streep

In between the first two Godfather films, Cazale acted in another Coppola film, The Conversation (1974), playing Stan, an assistant to a meticulous and devout surveillance expert (Gene Hackman) who scorns Stan’s irreverent attitude to their work. In 1975 Cazale and Pacino teamed up again in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, playing bank robbers whose holdup goes wrong. For his performance as the morose, sad-eyed—but genuinely threatening—sidekick to Pacino’s combustible grandstander, Cazale was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as best supporting actor.

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As his film career bloomed, Cazale continued to act in plays. In 1975 he and Pacino appeared at the Charles Playhouse in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, in which Cazale played the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, living undercover in Chicago as a gangster. In 1976 he played Angelo opposite Meryl Streep as Isabella in Measure for Measureat the New York Shakespeare Festival. According to Pacino, Cazale declared Streep “the greatest actress in the history of the world,” and they soon fell in love during the play’s run.

The Deer Hunter and death

A longtime chain-smoker, Cazale was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1977. Shortly after his diagnosis, he was cast in Michael Cimino’s Vietnam War epic The Deer Hunter (1978), alongside Streep, Robert De Niro, and Christopher Walken. Cazale plays Stan, one of a close-knit group of working-class friends who celebrate a wedding, go on a deer hunt, and then find their lives irrevocably changed after three of them are deployed. Because of his illness, Cazale was considered uninsurable and therefore a casting risk. According to Streep, De Niro secured Cazale’s role by paying for the additional cast insurance, which covers a film company’s costs if an actor becomes ill or injured or dies during production. Cimino shot Cazale’s scenes first. (Critics later remarked that Cazale looks visibly sick in the film.)

He died in March 1978, nine months before the premiere of The Deer Hunter. Streep stayed by his bedside in the hospital to the end, later telling The New York Times that she “read the sports page to John in [TV broadcaster] Warner Wolf accents to his dying day.” Of Cazale’s influence on her as an actor, Streep said that he “made everything mean something. Such good judgment, such uncluttered thought.”

Legacy

The McGinn/Cazale Theater (opened 1984) in Manhattan is named for Cazale and fellow actor Walter McGinn, who also died young. In 2009 the documentary I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale sparked renewed interest in Cazale’s life and career. It features interviews with Streep, Pacino, De Niro, and Coppola as well as younger actors whom he influenced, such as Steve Buscemi and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

In 2022 Pacino told The New York Times, “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.”