It's been more than four decades since lung cancer ended the life of John Cazale, the legendary Fredo from 'The Godfather, Meryl Streep's first great love and the only actor to have all his films nominated for the premier category of the Oscars
An inveterate liver, he smoked and drank in industrial quantities. Eternal secondary, he moved as if he had all the time in the world ahead of him, aware of the secrecy to which the backgrounds are relegated. He was slow because he enjoyed every moment, every sequence, his chemistry on stage with Meryl Streep, Pacino, or De Niro, without being aware that time was slipping through his fingers. He did so until he started spitting up blood, the first symptom of his untimely death at age 42, in 1978.
John Cazale died as James Dean, leaving few films behind but an indelible mark on the industry. Paradoxically, his calm was suddenly taken from him when lung cancer suddenly stopped his brilliant trajectory.
And, despite his achievements, his name is barely a breath in the annals of cinema history, far from what he was called to be, a legendary actor.
«You would go to dinner with him and you would finish, brush your teeth and go to bed before he finished the first course. Then he would take out the cigar. He lit it, looked at it, tasted it, and finally smoked it, "recalled his friend Al Pacino in the documentary 'Discovering John Cazale'. They met while working for an oil company before breaking into acting, and have been inseparable ever since, on and off the screen. "Again you. I know you, "the Oscar-winning actor released when they met again in 'The Indian Wants the Bronx', a work by Israel Horovitz, the first of several collaborations together. Thanks to another job with the theater director, 'La Cola', in which he starred alongside Richard Dreyfuss, the second would arrive: Cazale caught the attention of Francis Ford Coppola, who thought he saw in him someone who had always been overlooked, ideal to embody Fredo, despite the antagonistic description that Mario Puzo made of the eldest of Vito Corleone's sons. And he was not wrong.
"Failed Alpha Male"
John Cazale was unlike any other Hollywood actor. He was lanky, with a high forehead and a receding hairline. He was not the typical actor that the public left talking non-stop at the end of the film, as was the case with his colleagues Robert de Niro and Pacino. If they represented the good looks and swagger of the new generation of Hollywood, he was "the B side of American masculinity," the greatest exponent of the "loser philosophy." And yet his sallow skin oozed talent. "When John fixed his sunken eyes on something, he could look as hurt and desperate as a dying dog," journalist Michael Schulman describes him in 'Meryl Streep. Always her' (Peninsula Editions, 2018). A vulnerability that Cazale printed on his characters, few but powerful, who would end up making history like him, hardly making noise.
“He had a deep understanding that deep down in every person there was some kind of pain. It was perceived that he was a little damaged and he turned it into art, "Shulman says that Robyn Goodman, wife of his friend Walter McGuinn, told him in an interview. A philosophy with which his most iconic relationship, Meryl Streep, thanked his last Golden Globe a year ago: "Take your broken heart and turn it into art."
That pain that Cazale pursued and handled will resonate with him in his Fredo from 'The Godfather' when in his mustard yellow suit and sunglasses he poses as a big shot with the girls while tipping his elbow in Las Vegas. Also in Stan, the jester of the group of friends from 'The Hunter', "the failed alpha male", as summed up by the film's director Michael Cimino. "Undeterred, he could convey weakness, cowardice, shame, or fear. John could transform the weakest of the group into the best of the film, as long as attention was paid, "says the editor of 'The New Yorker'.
He won over his idol, Marlon Brando, who repeated a take when Vito Corleone is shot in the street to enjoy the Italian-American. “Brando thought so much of John that he lay back down by the sidewalk so John could perform near him. He was, so to speak, the highest of compliments », acknowledged director Marvin Starkman in an interview with Schulzman. Pacino, for his part, was full of praise for his friend, who according to him had inspired him a lot: «I learned more about acting from him than from anyone else. All I wanted to do was work with John for the rest of my life," he said in 2003
Robert de Niro also joined the gang, after coinciding with the actor in two films. Legend has it that it was he who paid for the sick Cazale's insurance so that the producers would not prevent his participation in 'The Hunter', although he remains ambiguous about it: «He was more serious than we thought, but I wanted him to come out in the film". His scenes were shot first, in a hurry due to the progressive decline of Cazale. After exceeding the budget and thousands of controversies, the film opened and beat 'The Return' at the Oscars, where Meryl Streep got her first nomination. But Cazale was not there to see it.
The love of his life
In that reputed list of followers, Meryl Streep was in the lead. They met in Shakespeare's stage adaptation of 'Measure for Measure', where their mutual S- attraction onstage became apparent even to theater critics. He was almost twice her age, and yet he became the actress's first great love, and also her most traumatic loss.
To pay for Cazale's medical bills, Streep signed her first television role, in the series 'Holocaust'; To be with him, already dying, she agreed to become the Linda cashier from 'The Hunter', "the one forgotten in the script and also in the lives of the other characters," the interpreter herself stated. Cazale considered the best living actress, played her best role, showing an optimism that she did not feel. "When I saw that girl there (in the hospital) with him, I thought there was nothing like it. That is what is important to me. As good as I am at her job, that's what I always remember when I think of her," Pacino said decades after her death.
But despite the admiration that movie legends professed for him, he was never recognized by the Hollywood Academy, which forgot to nominate him along with one of his films. A meager, and sometimes forgotten, filmography that, however, did not prevent him from achieving a still unbeaten record: all of his films (five) were nominated in the premier category of the Oscars.
On the morning of March 12, 1978, Cazale closed his eyes for good. Anger and shock filled for a while the emptiness left by the loss of him. At his funeral, different show personalities paid tribute to him. Horovitz, an unconscious promoter of his fame, wrote in his elegy: "John Cazale only happens once in a lifetime. It was an invention, a small perfection. No wonder his friends are so angry when they wake up from their sleep to discover that Cazale rests with kings and councilors, with Booth and Kean, with Jimmy Dean, with Bernhardt, Guitry, and Duse, with Stanislavski, with Groucho, Benny, and Allen. He leaves his audience, who loves him so much, the memory of his great calm, his silent waiting, his love for good music, his penchant for bad jokes, the absurd edge of the forest that was his hairline, the slice of watermelon that was his smile. It was unforgettable."
