Gena Rowlands, actress celebrated for her collaborations with her husband John Cassavetes – obituary
Gena Rowlands, who has died aged 94, was a hardy, versatile actress lauded for her excoriating collaborations with her husband of 45 years, the independent film pioneer John Cassavetes; in a run of projects that redefined American screen acting – starting with Faces (1968) and ending with Love Streams (1984) – Rowlands embodied women who were tough, troubled and only sporadically sympathetic.
A Midwestern blonde who modelled her younger self on Marlene Dietrich (Cassavetes nicknamed her “Golden Girl”), Gena Rowlands had to wait until her late thirties for these roles, making her a trailblazer within an American cinema growing ever more obsessed with youth. Yet she was as adventurous as her husband, and devoid of actorly vanity: she could look radiant or ravaged, as the camera demanded.
She earned her first Academy Award nomination as Mabel, the housewife whose stiflingly settled world collapses in on her in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which Cassavetes originally conceived as a play before a rethink at Gena Rowlands’s behest. On being confronted with such draining set-pieces as a 20-minute breakdown under medical supervision, Rowlands remarked: “John, I would be dead in two weeks if I played this on stage every night.”
The pair elaborated on that idea with Opening Night (1977), in which Gena Rowlands’s grande dame Myrtle Gordon finds herself beset by demons after witnessing a fan’s death during previews for her latest play. Pushing Cassavetes’s trademark psychodrama into explicitly supernatural territory – at a time when The Exorcist and The Omen had made horror big box office again – the film landed its star the Best Actress prize at the Berlin festival.
Cassavetes then took a left turn into action territory with Gloria (1980), in which Gena Rowlands played the eponymous moll, forced on the lam while protecting a young murder witness. The couple revived the project after it had been dropped by another actress: “I talked [him] into directing, we did it, and I had a great time shooting people and dodging people and running after taxis.” Such exertions landed Gena Rowlands a second Oscar nod.
The pair had first met in the early 1950s at the American Academy of Dramatic Art: “At the auditions, other students could drop in to watch the new actors, and John was there when it was my turn. He saw me, and he said to the friend who was next to him, ‘I’m going to marry her.’ ” At first, Gena Rowlands rebuffed Cassavetes’s advances: “Once in a while we would meet and get coffee, and he’d ask if I’d like to go out, and I said, ‘No, I’m not interested in going out with anyone. I’m going to be an actress.’ It just went along that way until I graduated.”
Despite marked differences in personality and taste – as Cassavetes observed, with equal parts exasperation and awe, “She thinks so totally opposite to anything I could conceive!” – the two married in 1954, and their ambitions quickly intertwined. Gena Rowlands made one of her first screen appearances in Cassavetes’s debut Shadows (1958), and was at her husband’s side during A Child Is Waiting (1963), the fractious work-for-hire that sparked fights with its producer Stanley Kramer and a complete rethink of the director’s methodology.
In Cassavetes’s subsequent work, Gena Rowlands served a dual role as both onscreen focal point and resident den mother, reassuring performers unnerved by her husband’s rigorous, sometimes punishing approach to making art. With relations further complicated by Cassavetes’s drinking, it wasn’t always easy. As Gena Rowlands once confessed: “He’s the most terrifying perfectionist about what he wants. As an artist, I love him. As a husband, I hate him.”
Yet by the time of Love Streams – their final collaboration, where they played ageing siblings – the pair were inseparable. As Roger Ebert noted while revisiting A Woman Under the Influence in 1988: “Movies are such a collaborative medium that we rarely get the sense of one person, but Cassavetes at least got it down to two: himself and Rowlands. The key to his work is to realise that it is always Rowlands, not the male lead, who is playing the Cassavetes role.” They remained together until the latter’s death from cirrhosis in 1989.
She was born Virginia Cathryn Rowlands in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 19 1930, the second of two children of Edwyn Rowlands, a banker of Welsh descent who became an assemblyman and senator, and Mary Allen Neal, a talented amateur painter (as “Lady Rowlands”, a nickname provided by her grandchildren, she provided artwork for several Cassavetes features).
It was an itinerant childhood, the family relocating to Washington and Minneapolis upon Edwyn’s appointment to the Department of Agriculture and the Office of Price Administration. Gena herself seemed restless, dropping out of the University of Wisconsin, before finding a home on stage and television.
She performed in the touring version of The Seven Year Itch and enjoyed an early triumph as a replacement for Eva Marie Saint in Paddy Chayefsky’s play Middle of the Night (1956). After catching eyes on the small screen in the science-inflected procedural Top Secret (1954), she appeared in several major hits, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1960) and Peyton Place (1967).
Her film debut came in the José Ferrer vehicle The High Cost of Loving (1958), but she initially preferred to work within a close circle of trusted associates. She rejoined Cassavetes in the Rome-shot crime saga Machine Gun McCain (1969) and the thriller Two-Minute Warning (1976), and reunited with Peter Falk, her husband in Woman Under the Influence, in a 1975 episode of Columbo.
Other directors were soon calling. She made The Brink’s Job (1978) for William Friedkin; she and Cassavetes were the couple at the centre of Paul Mazursky’s ripe Shakespearean romp Tempest (1982); she played Michael J Fox’s mother in Paul Schrader’s musical drama Light of Day (1987), and enjoyed one of her stronger non-Cassavetes roles as the philosophy professor eavesdropping on Mia Farrow’s therapy sessions in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988).
After Cassavetes’s death she worked more widely, both in the flourishing indie sector – Night on Earth (1991), The Neon Bible (1995) – and in the mainstream as a warm, nurturing presence, playing mum to Julia Roberts in Something to Talk About (1995) and Sandra Bullock in Hope Floats (1998).
Her children with Cassavetes had themselves reached directing age, and she collaborated with their daughter Zoe on the indie Broken English (1997) and with their son Nick on Unhook the Stars (1996) and the wildly successful weepie The Notebook (2004).
Her hallowed status among cinephiles was underlined when Pedro Almodóvar dedicated All About My Mother (1999) to her; two years later, Cahiers du Cinéma dubbed her “A Woman for All Seasons”. In 2015 she collected an honorary Oscar, the Academy acknowledging “an original talent [whose] devotion to her craft has earned her worldwide recognition as an independent film icon”.
By then she had remarried (to the businessman Robert Forrest in 2012) and all but retired, devoting herself to tending her first husband’s legacy. Retrospectives in London in 2001, Los Angeles in 2014 and New York in 2016 prompted renewed discussion of Cassavetes’s achievements, and of Gena Rowlands’s part within them. Reflecting on A Woman Under the Influence in later life, she concluded: “It was sort of a difficult role. But I like difficult roles.”
Gena Rowlands is survived by Robert Forrest, and by her three children with John Cassavetes, the actor-directors Nick, Xan and Zoe.
Gena Rowlands, born June 19 1930, died August 14 2024
