Actress Gena Rowlands in the 1960s.Movie Star News (ZUMAPRESS.com / Cordon Press)
Gena Rowlands died Wednesday at her home in Indian Wells, California, aged 94. The A Woman Under the Influence actress, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, was one of the great divas of American independent cinema between 1960 and 1980 and starred in a dozen films directed by her husband, the actor John Cassavetes, who died in 1989. To younger generations, Rowlands is a familiar face thanks to her role in The Notebook, the 2004 blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams and directed by her son, Nick Cassavetes.
The death was confirmed by her family, who were present on Wednesday at the home of the prolific actress and her second husband, businessman Robert Forrest. Nick Cassavetes had already revealed in June, during an interview with Entertainment Weekly, that his mother suffered from Alzheimer’s, a degenerative disease that was precisely what his character in The Notebook suffered from.
Gena Rowlands, alongside Peter Falk, in ‘A Woman Under the Influence’.FilmPublicityArchive/United Archive/Getty
“I got my mother to play an older Allie (Rachel McAdams’ role), and we spent a lot of time talking about Alzheimer’s and how her role could feel authentic. And now, in the last five years, she has suffered from this disease herself,” said Nick Cassavetes, two decades after the release of the romantic film. “It’s incredible what we lived through, how she played it, and now it weighs on her,” the director told the magazine. He also directed his mother in his first film, Unhook the Stars (1996) and in two other films, the last being Yellow, in 2012.
James Garner and Gena Rowlands in a scene from ‘The Notebook’ from 2004.Melissa Moseley (MPTV.net/CordonPress)
Cassavetes and Rowlands began as a couple in 1954, married after dating for four months and did not separate until the director died of cirrhosis in 1989. The marriage was tough. They had a tempestuous relationship, full of fights and misunderstandings, according to the American critic Ray Carney in the famous book Cassavetes by Cassavetes (Anagrama, 2004). “We had friction regarding lifestyle and tastes. We didn’t agree on absolutely anything,” admitted the director.
The couple left behind a considerable joint filmography, a dozen titles from a school of new realism that are mandatory material for any film lover. The list includes, among others, Faces, Opening Night, Love Streams, Shadows, Minnie and Moskowitz and the 1974 classic A Woman Under the Influence, alongside Peter Falk, the actor who made detective Colombo famous and also a recurring friend of Cassavetes’ films.
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Special mention must be made of Gloria, a 1980 thriller that her husband wrote for Rowlands but which he had intended for someone else to direct. The project, about a mother pursued by the New York mob, eventually fell into her hands and became another of her most celebrated films, with a great reception from critics. It won the Golden Lion at Venice that year.
Rowlands was nominated for Best Actress at the 1981 Oscars for Gloria, but lost to Sissy Spacek for her role in I Want to Be Free, the biopic of country singer Loretta Lynn. It was the second and final nomination for Rowlands, who was previously nominated for A Woman Under the Influence, perhaps the most famous collaboration of the Rowlands-Cassavetes duo. In the film, a construction worker (Falk) is forced to cancel a date with his wife, Mabel (Rowlands), setting in motion internal tensions within the marriage and their three children.
Actress Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, in 1984. M. McKeown (Getty Images)
“I really liked that script. It was a very difficult character, but I like difficult roles,” Rowlands told the Los Angeles Times in 2015, referring to A Woman Under the Influence, for which Cassavetes also earned a best director nomination (he also lost). Her Mabel was a mentally ill and uncontrollable woman, a role that led to her being revered by many of her colleagues.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Rowlands an honorary Oscar in 2015 in recognition of her career, full of everyday characters with intense inner worlds, mannerisms and, at times, exaggerated forms. A prolific career that also included work with Paul Schrader (Rock Star, 1987), Woody Allen (Another Woman, 1988), Jim Jarmusch (Night on Earth, 1991), Mira Nair (Blind Love, 2001) and Frédéric Auburtin and Gérard Depardieu (Paris, je t’aime, 2006), in a chapter where she reunited with Ben Gazzara, another of her first husband’s great friends and film fetishes. The actress collected the award in November 2015 at a ceremony in which director Spike Lee and actress Debbie Reynolds were also honored.
Born in Minnesota, Rowlands arrived in New York in 1950 to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, located in Carnegie Hall. But the experience was short-lived. The actress left the institution a year later because she could not afford it. Her stay was enough to change her life, as it was there that she first saw Cassavetes, although their romance would come four years later.
Her big-screen debut was in 1958 in the Puerto Rican José Ferrer film Cómo superar el alto costo de la vida, and then the western Los valientes andan solos (David Miller, 1962), alongside Kirk Douglas. These were followed by plays, films and television series. Rowlands won three Emmy Awards and several national and international critical accolades. “I was always very lucky, but I didn’t necessarily deserve it,” the actress humbly stated in a 2016 interview about her career.
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