Meryl Streep has been married to the sculptor Don Gummer for 40 years, together they shine on the red carpet and enjoy family life. However, few know that before that marriage, the multi-award-winning actress lived a story of romance, death and pain.
In a hospital room a woman tries to smile, adjusts the sheets and with infinite love she takes care of the man who is dying in a bed. He almost has no strength left, except to look at her. She looks at him, they look at each other, they don't speak. They feel - they know - that it is not necessary to profane with words those moments where everything is said without saying anything.
The man dying in a bed is an exquisite actor, an ugly seducer, a friend of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. His admission sheet indicates that his name is John Cazale, who is 42 years old and suffers from devastating cancer. The woman accompanying him is not yet 30 and is an actress. She doesn't know if she will ever be famous, what she does know is that the man she loves is dying and she can't help it. The nurses know his name is Meryl… Meryl Streep.
Before John was terminally ill and Meryl was his unconditional nurse, both were accomplices, partners, loved ones and lovers. Cazale was a unique actor with a strange record: he never participated in a bad film, the five in which he acted obtained more than 40 nominations between them, from the Oscar to the Golden Globes. He played Fredo, the weakest brother of the Corleone family , in The Godfather, he was also in The Conversation and Dog Day Afternoon. Those who hired him knew that he did not look like a Robert Redford or a Clint Eastwood. On the contrary, he was unattractive with bulging eyes, incipient baldness and a thin frame bordering on weak, and yet he was magnetic, attractive. A guy who went unnoticed because of his appearance but stood out for his personality and talent. That kind of beings that seem to go through life without anyone noticing their existence until, after the first face to face, one can no longer imagine life without them.
John and Meryl first crossed paths on stage when they starred in Shakespeare's stage adaptation Measure for Measure. The 15 years difference mattered little. The crush was mutual and intense. He described her to her friend Al Pacino with the best compliment that one actor can say about another: "I met the best artist in history and I worked with her." Pacino did not know if his friend was an exaggerator - years later he would verify that she was not - but he did recognize that he was in love.
She felt like she had never met a person like him. "She could transform something meaningless into something more meaningful. He had humanity and curiosity to learn more about people. He was very compassionate." In love, they happily went to live together in an apartment in New York. They loved theater and good movies as much as they despised television and a lack of talent. They spent hours talking about scenes and laughing out loud. Soon Cazale stopped being the great party animal, drinker and womanizer that everyone knew and transformed into someone who was monogamous but much more cheerful. At work, Cazale was already an established actor in supporting roles and therefore essential for great directors; Streep was starting her career. Life, dreams, the present and the future, everything seemed like it would be theirs.
But reality decided to knock them out. Before starting filming The Hunter, in which both appeared alongside Robert de Niro and Christoher Walken, Cazale began spitting blood. Worried, he and Meryl decided to consult a doctor. Studies, more studies and faces that presaged that something was wrong. What was supposed to be bad turned out to be worse; The diagnosis confirmed: cancer and a life expectancy of only three months. The couple was speechless. But Meryl knew it was not the time to break down and after a few moments she asked her partner where they were going to dinner that night. And so it was, they came together more than ever. Reserved, they shared the diagnosis with very few people, convinced that if death wanted to defeat them, they would at least put up a fight.
Despite the distrust of the producers who thought that he would not make it to the end of the film alive, Cazale began filming The Hunter. Many years later, Streep said that, given the executives' reluctance to hire him, Robert De Niro himself paid the actor's salary out of his own pocket. Furthermore, both of them convinced the producers to have an already weak Cazale film his scenes first.
