A peerless actress was Gena Rowlands. She was also the muse of actor and rightly renowned avant-garde filmmaker John Cassavetes (†1989), to whom she was married from 1954. It was an inspiration that was mutual. A number of great Cassavetes films are unthinkable without Rowlands. They married and had three children. Children who would also become filmmakers themselves.
She started acting young and continued to act into old age, consequently having a career that spanned some seventy years from her first roles in films such as Shadows (Cassavetes, 1959) to later films such as 2004's The Notebook directed by her son Nick Cassavetes in which she plays a woman with dementia, the condition that would also affect her in old age.
You could say she had several acting careers, the first two unmistakably with the films that Rowlands would make with Cassavetes and the whole group of -fantastic- actors around it. Actors such as Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Fred Draper, Seymour Cassell and many more plus of course the couple themselves in various leading roles. Films that sometimes had acting itself as the subject or in which life and work overlapped, as below.
Besides the mentioned Shadows (1959), films such as Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskovitz (1972), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977) and Love Streams (1984). Always with supporting roles from Rowlands.
Cassavetes' films are all gems of cinema and are partly unthinkable without the unsurpassed acting of Rowlands, as is the case in a classic scene from Opening Night, in which Rowlands shows a traumatized and therefore drunk actress. Ben Gazzara plays the director of the theater where she has to perform. Cassavetes, who directed the film, plays her co-star in the play where she has to perform.
Rowlands was the daughter of American Congressman Edwin Rowlands. She moved to New York at a young age, where she took acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Upon her admission, she met John Cassavetes, one year older, whom she married in 1954.
After the death of John Cassavetes, who died in 1989 at the age of 60 after a phenomenal film career, a new phase in her work began.
She worked, among others, with Paul Schrader, who directed her in The Light of Day, in 1988 with Woody Allen in the film Another Woman with, in addition to Rowlands, also Mia Farrow and Gene Hackman, in 1991 with Jim Jarmusch in the episodic film Night on Earth, in dialogue with Winona Ryder, and in dozens of other roles from the early 1990s to 2017.
Under the direction of her daughter Zoe Cassavetes, she made Broken English (2007) and with son Nick Cassavetes the aforementioned The Notebook.
Film critic Roger Ebert cited her change from the period with Cassavetes as demonstrating the actress' flexibility and continued stylistic evolution. Her talent and exceptional acting performances were noticed early and widely. For her roles in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and the gangster drama Gloria (Cassavetes, 1980), she received Oscar nominations for Best Actress. She also won the Silver Bear for Best Actress for Opening Night (1977). In 2015, Rowlands received an Academy Honorary Award (Oscar) in recognition of her film career and unique performances.
Gena Rowlands (June 19, 1930), aged 94, died on August 14, 2024 at her home in Indian Wells, California.