“Independent filmmaking existed before Cassavetes, but Cassavetes, working with Rowlands, managed to make an independent cinema that borrowed from Hollywood — not in plots or styles, but in actorly allure and dramatic power,” the New Yorker said in 2016.
The tall blond actress made 10 films with Cassavetes before his death in 1989, including the psychological drama Opening Night (1977), the marital saga Faces (1968), and 1984′s Love Streams, in which she played his sister.
“There was always a manic energy to the performances she gave in her late husband’s films, a fear of failure, a desire to love,” the awards website Golden Derby said of Rowlands.
In A Woman Under the Influence, which Cassavetes originally wrote as a play and is considered among her best performances, Rowlands played Mabel Longhetti, a housewife struggling with mental illness.
As the tough, determined title character in Cassavetes’ 1980 film Gloria, she rescued and protected a young, orphaned boy from mobsters determined to kill him.
“Rowlands’ sublime acting is almost unprecedentedly ID driven: her beleaguered heroines operate from such deep reserves of need that can only be accessed by Rowlands, who doesn’t just claim moments but wrestles with them in order to extract even tougher layers of authenticity,” critic Matthew Eng said on the Tribeca News website in 2016.
Although she didn’t win an Oscar for either role, Rowlands received an Honorary Academy Award in 2015.
Rowlands always wanted to act
Virginia Cathryn “Gena” Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Cambria, Wisconsin. Her father was a banker and politician, and her mother was an actress.
After college she moved to New York where she studied drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and met fellow student Cassavetes.
“I always wanted to be an actress; I read so much when I was little, and it revealed to me there were other things to be. You can live a lot of lives and have a lot of fun and see a lot of things,” she told the New York Times in 2016.
Rowlands worked in regional theatre and TV before making her Broadway debut in Middle of the Night in 1956. Two years later she landed her first film role, in The High Cost of Loving, and appeared in Cassavetes’s directorial debut film, Shadows.
“It was not like working for anybody else,” she told film critic Roger Ebert about her husband in 2016. “The freedom that John gave his actors was astounding.”
Rowlands continued to work in films, including Woody Allen’s 1988 drama Another Woman, and TV following Cassavetes’ death.
She won best actress Emmys for the The Betty Ford Story (1987) and the drama Face of a Stranger (1992), and took home a best supporting trophy in a miniseries or movie for Hysterical Blindness (2002).
The independent film icon found a new audience when she returned to the big screen in 2004 as the older version of actress Rachel McAdams’s character in The Notebook.
Rowlands was married to Cassavetes from 1954 until his death. They had three children. In 2012, she wed businessman Robert Forrest.
“It’s a tricky life, but it was so exciting and wonderful because you were doing what you really wanted to do,” she said about acting and making independent films.
