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Next came Vassar and the recognition that this wholesome young woman possessed an eerie gift. Clinton Atkinson, a director on the college staff, found her acting "hair raising, absolutely mind boggling. I don't think anyone ever taught Meryl acting; she really taught herself." After graduating with a major in drama, she joined a small repertory company in Vermont and then won a three-year scholarship to the Yale School of Drama. Her classwork won ever higher praise. "Whenever she did a scene," says Director Robert Lewis, who was a professor there at the time, "you wished that the author were there to see it." She was also much in demand for major roles by the Yale Repertory Theater. By the time she earned her master of fine arts degree she had developed an incipient ulcer: "It was very liberating when I got out to find that you're not competing with 24 people but with 20,000 others."
Meryl had auditioned in New York occasionally while still at Yale. When she moved to the city, directors scrambled to use her. Her first professional appearance was at Lincoln Center in Joseph Papp's production of Trelawney of the Wells. Next she played in a program of two one-act plays and did the seemingly impossible: she became both a slovenly, bovine Southerner in Tennessee Williams' Twenty Seven Wagons Full of Cotton and a thin, sexy secretary in Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays. Says Director Arvin Brown: "The audience didn't realize that they had seen the same girl twice." These were the first of seven stage roles that Meryl was to play in 1976.
During one, a Central Park production of Measure for Measure, she worked with John Cazale, a respected actor known to film audiences for his role as the cowardly son Fredo in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II. They fell in love and began living together. Actor Joe Grifasi, a friend of both at the time, says: "Meryl admired his ability to cut through the crap and focus on the essentials. He was very careful to maintain his equilibrium." They spent as much time together as their careers permitted; the summer of 1977 found them in Steubenville, Ohio, working on The Deer Hunter. Neither one talked on the set about what they both knew by then: Cazale had bone cancer and, barring a miracle, was dying.
Meryl next went to Austria to work on the TV series Holocaust. Cazale was too weak to follow her. "I wanted to go home," she says. "John was very sick and I wanted to be with him. But they just kept extending the damn thing. It was like being in prison for 2½ months." Actor Fritz Weaver shared this internment and remembers Meryl admiringly: "In Holocaust she played a woman whose lover was imprisoned in a concentration camp. Meryl must have been living it twice, in the story and in real life. But there was not one moment of self-pity."