Every Film He Made Rated a Best Picture?

He inspired lover Meryl Streep: ‘He wasn’t like anybody I’d ever met…’ Five Best Pictures in 7 years? The amazing John Cazale

You know Academy Award champion Meryl Streep — but do you recall the actor who changed her life? Every John Cazale film was nominated for Best Picture and rated among the greatest films ever.

Streep won three Academy Awards (a record of 21 nominations). Cazale taught Meryl Streep how to become the best actress ever — and most importantly, he taught her how to live, love, and die.

“She doesn’t talk about it much,” Michael Schulman, author of Her Again, told the New York Post. “But that year was so wildly eventful and dramatic in her life. It was instrumental in shaping who she was as a person and an actor.”

Say his name aloud: John Cazale. Most draw a blank, not recognizing his name. Show his photo, and — if they recognize him — they smirk and ask: “Fredo?”

Fifty years after he created the Fredo character for The Godfather and Godfather II, the beloved stars he worked with (the greatest of their generation) say they learned more from Cazale than any other actor.

Over seven years, the five films he appeared in amassed a combined 40 Academy Award nominations (but Cazale wasn’t nominated). All five are classics: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Deer Hunter, The Conversation, and Dog Day Afternoon. Two competed against each other for Best Picture in the same year. Three of the five won.

Al Pacino: Cazale was so good he became whoever he portrayed

“He could do anything,” said Al Pacino (who worked with him in three of his five films). “He became whoever it was he was playing, and he did that by asking questions… I think I learned more about acting from John than anybody.”

Every performer must “act in unison with your role,’’ the father of modern acting, Konstantin Stanislavski believed. So you must blend who you are and who you need to become, to “pour into it all of his own soul. The fundamental aim of our art is the creation of this inner life of a human spirit.”

Digging deep into this method, Cazale inspired everyone around him to perform better, Pacino said, “So you did it. He made you better.”

Most of the stars Cazale worked with became Academy Award winners. So people watch a John Cazale performance and assume he’s simply “playing himself,” yet each character looks and seems very different, coming alive in every bit of him.

In 1976, at age 40, Cazale was co-starring in the William Shakespeare play Measure for Measure, meeting the much-younger 27-year-old Streep.

When Cazale met Streep, he told Pacino: “‘I met the greatest actress’… She was mad for him, and he was mad for her. They had found each other.”

Even in the funniest characters that Cazale played, there was always something tragic, Streep explains, “and even in the most tragic characters, there was always something very funny.”

Streep says Cazale “wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met. It was the specificity of him, sort of humanity, his curiosity about people… I was more glib, ready to pick the first thing that came to me, and he would say, ‘There are a lot more possibilities,’ and that was a real lesson. I really took that to heart. I always think about it.”

Lung cancer? Dead at 42

The two were in love, inseparable, this funny-looking couple who planned to marry as soon as one of them got that “big break.” But in May 1977, while starring in another play, Cazale got sick.

Finally, the diagnosis arrived: terminal metastasized lung cancer. Cazale was a smoker, but he was only 41. He became “heroic,” colleagues recall, and Streep devoted herself to caring for him. Streep felt like she was “going crazy,” knowing she needed to be with him until the end.

He was so respected and admired that friends helped Cazale and Streep perform together in The Deer Hunter, so he could have one final chance to shine. And he did. Then the true drama began.

Streep later recalled, “I moved into his hospital room and read him the sports pages and did imitations of newsreaders. I was so close to him that I couldn’t see that he was so close to death. When it came, it was a shock…What John’s death did is make me confront my own mortality.”

On March 13, 1978, a doctor woke Streep telling her Cazale was dead at age 42. Streep was just 28.

Later that same year, Streep met and married sculptor Don Gummer, and the two have been married ever since (a rarity in Hollywood). Then, in December 1979, her first breakthrough role arrived, and her first Academy Award followed.

“I’ve hardly ever seen a person so devoted to someone who is falling away like John was,” Pacino recalls. “To see her in that act of love for this man was overwhelming.”