Gena Rowlands, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for the string of films she collaborated on with her husband, the director John Cassavetes, has died aged 94 her son, Nick Cassavetes, said on Wednesday. In 2024 Nick revealed that she had Alzheimer’s.
A successful actor before and after her films with John Cassavetes, it is nevertheless the string of films she made with her actor-turned-director husband that came to define her career. In Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980) and Love Streams (1984), Rowlands played a series of groundbreaking roles as damaged and yearning women in emotionally committed performances of a kind all too rare in American cinema of the period. As she told the Guardian in 2001: “It was considered embarrassing for an older woman to have anything to say about anything emotional.”
Born in 1930 in in Madison, Wisconsin, Rowlands won a place at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1953; at her audition she met Cassavetes, who was a student there. They were married within a year and both worked as actors on stage and screen. Rowlands made her Broadway debut opposite Edward G Robinson in 1956 in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night, and in 1959 guest-starred on Johnny Staccato, the cop series Cassavetes starred in.
Cassavetes became interested in directing, and in 1958 finished the landmark new wave film Shadows, which grew out of acting workshops he organised. Rowlands did not appear in Shadows but was cast in a small role in A Child Is Waiting, Cassavetes’ third film as director, over which he clashed with producer Stanley Kramer. Thereafter Cassavetes and Rowlands decided to work independent of Hollywood, with Faces, released in 1968, a key step forward. In what was hailed as a searingly realistic study of a marital breakdown, Rowlands played a sex worker who is hired by unhappy husband John Marley.
Rowlands followed this up with a series of roles in films directed by Cassavetes. In Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Rowlands was an art gallery curator reeling from a breakup who meets and is pursued by the eccentric Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel); in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), for which both she and Cassavetes received Oscar nominations, she is a married woman undergoing a breakdown. Opening Night (1977) saw her play a theatre actor with mental illness; and in Gloria (1980), for which she earned a second best actress Oscar nomination, she played the former girlfriend of a mobster who takes a small boy, the only survivor of a mob hit on her neighbours, on the run. Her final film with Cassavetes was Love Streams (1984), in which she played the divorcee sister to Cassavetes’s alcoholic.
During Cassavetes’s illness-dogged latter years and leading up to his death in 1989, Rowlands maintained a parallel career in TV, winning acclaim for roles in TV dramas such as Thursday’s Child and The Betty Ford Story. She also began to branch out in the film industry, playing a philosophy professor in emotional crisis in Woody Allen’s Another Woman in 1988, Winona Ryder’s cab passenger in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), and Aunt Mae in Terence Davies’s 1995 adaptation of The Neon Bible. She also appeared in films directed by her son Nick Cassavetes, including She’s So Lovely (1997), a love-triangle drama based on a script by John Cassavetes, and cult romance The Notebook (2004), which featured Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling. Rowlands also appeared in another of her children’s films: Broken English (2007), the feature debut of Zoe Cassavetes and starring Parker Posey.
Rowlands is survived by three children, Nick, Alexandra (also a film-maker) and Zoe, and married for a second time, in 2012, to Robert Forrest. She was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2015.
