Actress Gena Rowlands made Hollywood interested in women over forty

Luckily she thought so too. Interviewedabout ten years ago, on the occasion of a retrospective of the films she made between the late sixties and early eighties with her husband John Cassavetes (1929-1989), actress Gena Rowlands (94), who passed away this week, was asked which of them were her favorites. To which she bluntly replied: all of them. And asked where she would put them in the top hundred of all time: at the top.

Of course she was right. How can you choose between the reckless comedy about the equally reckless love between title characters Minnie and Moskovitz in the eponymous 1971 film and the tale of a reluctant gangster surrogate mother in the action thriller Gloria (1980)? They’re both equally good. Or between the marriage dramas Faces (1968) in Husbands (1970)? The latter was given a second life in the Netherlands in 2011 by the performance by Ivo van Hove, at the time still Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Just like Opening Night from 1977. Then suddenly Gena Rowlands was played by Elsie de Brauw.

The Netherlands and Gena Rowlands will therefore always belong together. But also because of the tribute John & Gena that Wunderbaum brought to the stage last year. And by putting it on Opening Night inspired The Second Womanwhich was shown during the last Holland Festival in Amsterdam, now with a leading role for Georgina Verbaan. How many plays have been made about other actresses? Exactly!

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It is hard to think of an actress whose life and work were so closely linked to her husband’s, but who also had an extensive career of her own. It earned her two Oscar nominations and an honorary Oscar in 2015. In addition to the ten films she made with Cassavetes, she has about a hundred other film and TV credits. Many of them television, because she quickly discovered that there were far more interesting female roles for her there than in the cinema.

She was fearless. She once said that if she hadn’t met Cassavetes, she would have been doomed to play the pretty blonde in rom-coms. To which she added: “But beauty is so commonplace in Hollywood that it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Gena Rowlands in 1957. Foto Dick Strobel

First love

Reason why she often returned to the theatre. That was her first love, before Virginia Cathryn Rowlands, born in Wisconsin in 1930, met Cassavetes at drama school in New York in 1953, whom she married within a year. They would have three children, all three of whom also built up a career as film directors. With them she would play memorable supporting roles, such as that of a demented woman in the uber-romantic tearjerker The Notebook (2004), who remembers her great love one more time. This summer, her family announced that she herself had been living with Alzheimer’s for the past five years; she died as a result of the disease.

Despite brilliant performances in films by Jim Jarmusch (in taxi film Night on Earthin the backseat of Winona Ryder, in 1991) or Terence Davies (as an eccentric aunt who takes care of her nephew during World War II in The Neon Bible1996) the films with Cassavetes remain unique and unparalleled. He was not only the first major independent director who worked in Hollywood, but also developed his films together with Rowlands. He must have asked her regularly: what would you like to play next? Then he took out yet another mortgage on their house, and converted the living room into a film set, and she would cook dinner for the crew in between learning lines. Thanks to this duo, Hollywood not only became interested in women over forty, but also in women with real, individual lives and layered and complex characters. And as if that wasn’t enough: women who suffered under the beauty ideals and caregiving duties that society imposed on them. Who were different and wanted to be.

There are two films that sum this up beautifully. In addition to the already mentioned Opening Nightwhich is also an ingenious film about the illusory world of acting itself, is above all A Woman under the Influence (1974). Rowlands plays a housewife who, after a nervous breakdown, must resume her role as mother and wife. But what has changed, other than the diagnosis and a supply of pills? What is this ‘under the influence’? Isn’t it just the patriarchy that leaves no room for imaginative and impulsive women?

The opening scene in which husband Peter – Columbo – Falk comes home in the morning with his teammates and in which she cooks spaghetti for the whole gang (in her own kitchen) is famous. Rowlands can play superbly syncopated, which makes her seem to have little tics and put on contrary accents. It would be in A Woman under the Influence could very well be a sign of a mental disorder. But the film also attacks the ease with which women in the sixties and seventies were prescribed ‘mother’s little helper’ (pills). She is not crazy. She is normal. She is a string, stretched far too tightly. And from which notes escape before you even strike it. That is of course the result of refined technical playing. Playing in such a way that you almost snap. Pff, she would say, with one of her famous hand gestures. As if it was nothing. But how exciting and spectacular that was time and time again.

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