John Cazale - Stage Career

Stage Career

Cazale moved to New York City and worked as a messenger at Standard Oil, where he met Al Pacino, another aspiring actor.

"When I first saw John, I instantly thought he was so interesting," recalled Pacino. "Everybody was always around him because he had a very congenial way of expressing himself." While living together in a communal house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Cazale and Pacino were cast in a play by Israel Horovitz, The Indian Wants the Bronx, for which they both won Obie Awards in 1967-1968. He later won another Obie for the leading role in Horovitz's Line, where he was noticed by Godfather casting director Fred Roos, who then suggested him to director Francis Ford Coppola.

Cazale had acted on stage with Robert De Niro and Cazale's lover at the time of his death, Meryl Streep, whom he met when they were both in the Public Theater's 1976 production of Measure for Measure. In that role, wrote Mel Gussow of The New York Times, "Mr Cazale, often cast as a quirky, weak outsider, as in The Godfather, here demonstrates sterner mettle as a quietly imperious Angelo who sweeps down, vulturelike, to deposit virtue." He also acted in a short film entitled The American Way, directed by Marvin Starkman in 1962.