Gena Rowlands, the wife and muse of John Cassavetes whose unvarnished abilities found in such films as Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night and Gloria put her in the pantheon of acting legends, died Wednesday. She was 94.
Rowlands died surrounded by family members at her home in Indian Wells, California, according to TMZ. A spokesperson for WME, where her son, writer-director Nick Cassavetes, has representation, confirmed her death. She had battled Alzheimer’s since 2019.
Rowlands received Oscar nominations for her performances in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), where she played an isolated, emotionally vulnerable housewife who lapses into madness, and Gloria (1980), where she sparkled as a pissed-off child protector who rails against the Mob.
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She lost out to Ellen Burstyn of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Sissy Spacek of Coal Miner’s Daughter in those Academy Award races. Her greatness wasn’t formally acknowledged by the Academy until she received an honorary Oscar at the 2015 Governors Awards.
“You know what’s wonderful about being an actress?” Rowlands said at the ceremony. “You don’t just live one life — yours — you live many lives.”
John Cassavetes directed his wife in A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria as well as in Shadows (1959), A Child Is Waiting (1963), Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Opening Night (1977) and Love Streams (1984). He wrote all but one of those dramas as well, and together, the couple kick-started the independent film movement in America.
Her husband “loved actors, and he had a particular interest in women. Women in movies, I should say!” Rowlands told THR‘s Scott Feinberg in 2015. “He was interested in women’s problems and where they are in society and what they have to overcome. He offered me some really wonderful parts.”
Rowlands starred for Nick Cassavetes as a lonely widow in Unhook the Stars (1996) and as an elderly woman with dementia in The Notebook (2004). She also appeared for him in She’s So Lovely (1997), based on a script from John Cassavetes.
Her daughters, Zoe Cassavetes and Xan Cassavetes, are writer/directors as well.
At her best when playing beleaguered heroines, Rowlands often downplayed her corn-fed Midwestern beauty, subverting her good looks when the part called for it — as in Opening Night, when she portrayed the aging and insecure stage actress Myrtle Gordon.
Still, Rowlands‘ undeniable tour de force was starring as Mabel Longhetti, whose construction worker husband (Peter Falk) sends her to an institution in Woman Under the Influence.
In a 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Rowlands said she didn’t receive any special treatment because she was married to the director — like when she asked John a question as they filmed the first scene in Woman Under the Influence.
“I usually don’t ask questions,” she said. “I said, ‘I am sort of stuck.’ He said, ‘Gena, before you go any further, I wrote the picture with you in mind. You said you liked it.’ I said I loved it. He said, ‘You said you wanted to do it.’ I said, ‘I do.’ And he said, ‘Then do it.’ “
Rowlands indicated that this unfiltered response “was the most freeing, wonderful piece of advice. You didn’t have to depend on anybody or anything anybody said. It was yours to do with as you saw. It was like someone gave you a gift.”
In Gloria, Rowlands displayed startling resilience as Gloria Swenson, a former girlfriend of a mobster who goes on the run to protect the young boy (John Adames) who lives next door. It was an action-packed movie, but she considered it a “gangster comedy.”
In Ray Carney’s 2001 book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, the writer-director says he agreed to do the film because Rowlands wanted to play a role that captured the way she sometimes thought of herself — the “sexy but tough woman who doesn’t really need a man” type, like one of her idols, Marlene Dietrich.
“She sets the initial premise and follows the script very completely,” Cassavetes said. “Very rarely will she improvise, though she does in her head and in her personal thoughts. Everybody else is going boom! boom! boom!, but Gena is very dedicated and pure.
“She doesn’t care if it’s cinematic, doesn’t care where the camera is, doesn’t care if she looks good — doesn’t care about anything except that you believe her. She caught the rhythm of that woman living a life she’d never seen. When she’s ready to kill, I’m amazed at how coldly she does it.”
In quite the testimonial, Tennessee Williams once compared Rowlands to a work of art that “you place yourself in front of as if they were paintings in a museum, or sunsets, or mountains, or lovers walking slowly away from you.”
Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wisconsin. Her father was a banker and state senator, and her mother had been invited to be a Ziegfeld girl but pursued a career in art instead.
Rowlands attended the University of Wisconsin but left to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. It was there that she met Cassavetes, an alum a year ahead of her who spotted Rowlands in a student production of J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner.
Four months after they met, she and Cassavetes were married in 1954 and were together until he died from cirrhosis in February 1989. He was 59.
Rowlands‘ first professional stage appearance came in a Provincetown Playhouse drama. She also did live TV and was cast by producer-director Joshua Logan in 1956 to play a young woman who falls in love with an older man (Edward G. Robinson) in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night.
After 18 months with the play, Rowlands signed with MGM and made her feature debut as Jose Ferrer’s confident wife in the drama The High Cost of Loving (1958). She went on to perform in the Dalton Trumbo Western Lonely Are the Brave (1962) with Kirk Douglas, in The Spiral Road (1962) opposite Rock Hudson and in Tony Rome (1967) with Frank Sinatra.
On television in the 1960s, Rowlands played the deaf-mute wife of a detective on the NBC series 87th Precinct and the temptress Adrienne Van Leyden on ABC’s Peyton Place.
She and Cassavetes, however, made other people’s movies — like Machine Gun McCain (1969), Two-Minute Warning (1976) and Paul Mazursky‘s Tempest (1982), when they acted together — to support their own.
“We wanted a certain way of life. We wanted to get up and really do what we wanted to do that day,” she once said. “We didn’t want to go do something that everyone said we should do. Believe me, everyone was saying we were doing the wrong thing, all of the time. But it was terribly satisfying.
“I think of the kids too. Every time they stepped out of their bedrooms, they were tripping over a cable or bumping into a camera. They were very easy with it. It wasn’t some kind of exotic thing where your parents went to the studio; they didn’t feel shut out of it.”
In Faces, Rowlands played a caring professional escort. And in Love Streams, she was wonderful in a screwball comedy.
Rowlands also won three Emmy Awards (from eight nominations), with one for playing the first lady in 1987’s The Betty Ford Story and another for portraying a waitress in a diner who is romanced by another Cassavetes regular, Ben Gazzara, in 2002’s Hysterical Blindness.
She starred opposite Bette Davis in the 1979 telefilm Strangers — The Story of a Mother and Daughter and with Jane Alexander (they played a lesbian couple raising three children) in a 1983 Hallmark production of Thursday’s Child.
Rowlands played Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett’s mother in Light of Day (1987); appeared as a philosophy professor in Woody Allen‘s Another Woman (1988); and starred for Lasse Hallström in Once Around (1991) and Something to Talk About (1995) and for her daughter Zoe in Broken English (2007).
Her more recent film appearances came in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) — the first film she made after Cassavetes‘ death — Silent Cries (1993), Hope Floats (1998), The Weekend (1999), The Skeleton Key (2005) and Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks (2014).
Survivors also include her second husband, retired businessman Bob Forrest.
Director Sidney Lumet once said of Rowlands:
“The highest compliment I can pay to her — to anyone — is that the talent frightens me, making me aware of the lack of it in so many and the power that accrues to those who have it and use it well. And the talent educates and illuminates. She is admirable, which can be said of only a few of us.”
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
