An actress on the edge

By PETER CALDER


Among the few genuine pleasures to be found in The Notebook, an otherwise rather plodding and predictable love story which opens in cinemas today, is the sight of one of the truly great actresses of the American cinema, hard at work at 74, and as deeply impressive as ever.

Gena (rhymes with "henna") Rowlands plays an elderly woman in the grip of senile dementia in sequences that frame the central tale of defiant young love. Her scenes - unostentatious, closely observed and powerfully affecting - are the film's best.

The strikingly blond Rowlands has lent her special brand of cool grace to more than 30 films (and an equal number of television shows and series) over almost 50 years, working for writer-directors as distinguished as Woody Allen (Another Woman), Jim Jarmusch (Night on Earth) and Terence Davies (Neon Bible).

Those performances and a dozen others were always memorable and sometimes mesmerising displays of acting craft; what has assured her a place in the pantheon of real greats is the body of work she did between 1963 and 1984 with her husband, the late, great writer and director John Cassavetes.

In seven films - notably Gloria (1980) and A Woman Under the Influence 10 years earlier, both of which earned the actress Oscar nominations - Rowlands and Cassavetes established themselves as pioneers of independent film-making, back when that term meant something.

They gathered around them an ensemble of actors - Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel were regulars - who would work for next to nothing until the money ran out, and everyone had to pick up high-paying gigs to pay the bills for a while.

Talking from her home in the Hollywood hills, Rowlands is enthusiastic about a spooky thriller she's just finished called The Skeleton Key, partly because "I've never done anything like that before".

"It's different in the sense that it's a thriller," she says. "I play the mother of a psychopath and there's a moment when I'm in an elevator, and he says 'Hello, mother' from the dark in the back of the elevator. That scene was why I wanted to do the film because I wanted to play the moment when you are suddenly vulnerable and see what you do."

Gena Rowlands does vulnerable well, it must be said, although she is more often prey to her own psyche than psychopaths. Her most memorable characters are women grappling with themselves; Marion in Another Woman is one of Woody Allen's most complex and fascinating creations.

"I've had some really terrific parts," she enthuses. "A lot of them have been women on the edge, facing certain things. I like that."

Her roles for Cassavetes were certainly women on the edge: a suburban housewife slipping into insanity in A Woman Under the Influence; an ageing, derailing actress in Opening Night (of which Almodovar's All About My Mother, which was dedicated to Rowlands, is a virtual rewrite); as the gun-toting moll who's the title character of Gloria; a young prostitute embroiled in a contest of marital infidelity in Faces.

Unsurprisingly she says that the Cassavetes roles are "my very favourites".

"They would be any actress' favourites because an actress can only be as good as what the writer writes for her. It's the writer who is the real artist because he or she starts from nothing. We just interpret. John wrote such wonderful parts it was pretty hard to do them poorly."

Despite the often grim nature of the stories in those films, Rowlands remembers their making as "an extraordinarily happy time".

"All of our friends we were working with, it got to a kind of repertory. We were totally free to do what we wanted. That's very unusual in any day. You may talk about 'independent' films these days but whoever puts the money up wants to have a say.

"Fortunately, John and I were both actors [Cassavetes' commercial roles included playing Mia Farrow's husband in Polanski's Rosemary's Baby] so when we ran out of money, which was frequently, we'd go and make other people's movies so we could afford to make our own."

Film-making for Rowlands continues to be a family affair. The Notebook is her third collaboration with her director son Nick Cassavetes.

In the first, Unhook the Stars, unreleased here, she played a woman suddenly widowed and drew on the shock she felt when her husband died suddenly in 1989.

"I was a zombie for a couple of years," she said at the time of that film's release. "It really takes a lot of strength to deal with a loss like that, just when you don't have any strength to spare."

But she says that working with Nick is not like seeing John reincarnated.

"He's his own man," she says. "Though he is like his father in the sense that they both adore actors. And that's not always true.

"A lot of directors don't really like actors. Oftentimes you're in a regular movie and you're working really hard keeping this internal life going, and you walk on set and there's guys standing round reading the paper or talking about what they did last night. They don't think what that's like for the actor. They think [acting's] like a faucet and you just turn it on.

"Nick and John both create a set where nobody is thinking about anything but the work."

Nick, who grew most of his 2m height by his early teens, started calling his mother Gena at age 11. But on The Notebook, there was a slip of the tongue, she says.

"Jim [co-star James Garner] and I were ready to go and Nick said: 'Okay, Mom, action!' And James fell apart. He said: 'All these years, I never heard anyone say, "Mom, action!".'

"Nick did it all through the movie and then he started calling me Gena again.

"I don't know why. I think it's best to let some things be a mystery."

On screen

*Who: Gena Rowlands in The Notebook

*Where and when: Lido, Bridgeway, Berkeley, Village SkyCity, opens today