Gena Rowlands, a luminous leading lady of independent film, has died

A leading lady of 1970s independent film has died. Gena Rowlands was best known for starring in intelligent, idiosyncratic films directed by her husband John Cassavetes.

Rowlands died at the age of 94. Her death was confirmed by the office of Danny Greenberg, the representative for Rowlands’ son, Nick Cassavetes. No further details were provided.

Born in 1930, Rowlands was the daughter of a state senator in the now-defunct Wisconsin Progressive Party. She was a sickly, picky child. But as she told Terry Gross on WHYY’s Fresh Air, she was blessed with a playful, artistic mother.

“I remember one time, I wouldn’t eat carrots. I wouldn’t eat anything yellow,” Rowlands remembered in the 1996 interview. “So she cut a carrot into the shape of a goldfish…. She put it in a goldfish bowl with water in it, and she came in to where I was sick and she said, `I have an uncontrollable urge.’ She said, `I can’t stand it. I’ve got to eat this goldfish. I’ve got to do it.’ I said, `No, no, no, no, don’t do it.’ She said, `I’ve got to, unless you eat this carrot.’….[She] would go to the most extraordinarily kind of creative lengths to do these things for me.”

In 1950, Rowlands left for New York to study acting at the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts, where she met fellow student Cassavetes. But Rowlands dropped out and began appearing professionally on stage, including in a small role in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night on Broadway.

She married Cassavetes in 1954. The two started working in commercial television, sometimes together. Rowlands fleshed out even the most fragile characters with gusto, and Cassavetes would emerge as one of the most distinctive independent directors of his era.

The couple made 10 films together before his death in 1989. Many of their movies were filmed at their house in Los Angeles, starring friends such as Peter Falk. One of the most famous, A Woman Under the Influence, followed an emotionally unstable housewife trying to please her working-class husband.

“That was my favorite movie. I loved doing that movie,” Rowlands told the film review website RogerEbert.com. “In that film, I was a little wacko, but my husband understood that and he loved me, and it didn’t bother him that I was as strange as I could be. When I have this terrible breakdown and have to go away for a while, leave him and my children, oh — that’s a hard scene. We’re showing a hard moment in a person’s life, a terribly hard moment.”

For her performance, Rowlands was nominated for an Oscar. She would be nominated again for 1980’s Gloria, in which she played a gangster’s ex-girlfriend.

“It wasn’t actually written for me, it was written for another actress, but her audience wanted a more glamorous story,” Rowlands told RogerEbert.com. “I talked John into directing it the movie, we did it, and I had a great time shooting people and dodging people and running after taxis.”

Rowlands, who received an honorary Oscar in 2015, played her husband’s sister in his last film, 1984’s Love Streams. She was the mother in a groundbreaking 1985 TV film about a gay man with AIDS, Early Frost. She also played the lead role in another TV film, The Betty Ford Story, two years before John Cassavetes died. The cause was cirrhosis of the liver, complications from his years of alcoholism.

Rowlands starred opposite Mia Farrow in Woody Allen’s 1988 film Another Woman. In Jim Jarmusch’s 1991 movie Night on Earth,  she played a Hollywood doyenne driven around Los Angeles by Winona Ryder, her cabdriver.

Early in her career, Rowlands had worked with her mother, an aspiring actress and set designer. Later, when Rowlands’ own children matured into filmmakers in their own right, she performed in their films as well. In her son Nick Cassavetes’ 2004 film The Notebook, Rowlands played a character living with Alzheimer’s.

Twenty years later, Nick Cassavetes went public about his mother’s own diagnosis of the disease. “She’s in full dementia,” he told Entertainment Weekly in June 2024. “We lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”

By NPR