August 21, 2024

Gena Rowlands: A Life in Pictures

 

The late actress might have followed in the path of so many other studio-system bombshells. But in one explosive performance after another, Ms. Rowlands proved she had more to offer.

 A black-and-white portrait of Gena Rowlands, resting her head on folded arms. She wears her hair in a quintessential 1960s bouffant. 

 

You would never guess it from a film still. You could never imagine that, alone among her contemporaries, Gena Rowlands had the power to gaze into the lens of a camera and shatter every assumption about a woman’s psyche.

Though she came of age in an era of febrile bombshells, Hitchcock heroines with porcelain complexions and refrigerator cool, ditzes studiedly masking inner realities to conform to demeaning stereotypes, her career followed a different course.

Ms. Rowlands, whose death, at 94, was announced on Wednesday, began her career on 1950s television. She might easily have become just another midlevel product of the studio system had she not been cast in “Johnny Staccato,” an NBC series about a private detective played by her future husband, the actor and director John Cassavetes.

Although Ms. Rowlands’s diverse career encompassed nearly seven decades; garnered her three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes and two Academy Award nominations (she was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2015); and included collaborations with directors as unalike as Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and Mira Nair, it is her work with Mr. Cassavetes that inspired The New Yorker, in a 2021 ranking of great cinematic moments, to pronounce her “the most important and original movie actor of the past half century-plus.”

What she embodied in the 10 films she made with her husband, most indelibly in “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), was “the mystery that lies between human beings dwelling in emotional extremity, which is of course the only place that Cassavetes’s characters can dwell,” as the writer and director Katherine Dieckmann, who teaches in Columbia University’s film program, once wrote. Ms. Rowlands once told The Associated Press that her husband “had a particular sympathetic interest in women and their problems in society, how they were treated and how they solved and overcame what they needed to.”

He also had a fearless — some might say ruthless — ability to mine Ms. Rowlands’s vulnerability onscreen to capture performances possibly without equivalent in cinematic history. “She’s a very beautiful woman in every instance,” Ms. Dieckmann said in an interview. “Yet she was so willing to be messy, to completely break that face open for a performance.” If, as she added, we tend to make assumptions about “blondes who look like that,” what Ms. Rowlands achieved as an actor was validation of the truth that surfaces are seldom to be trusted. “Beauty like that can, I imagine, feel like a


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A black-and-white photo of a flawlessly made-up Gena Rowlands, wearing a patterned sheath dress and double strand of pearls, reclining on a deck chair. Her husband, John Cassavetes, sits upright at the foot of the lounger.
Credit...Leo Fuchs/Getty Images

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands at the couple’s home in Los Angeles in 1961.

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A black-and-white head shot of Gena Rowlands.
Credit...Dick Strobel/Associated Press

Ms. Rowlands began her career on 1950s television.

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A black-and-white photo of a glamorous Gena Rowlands, wearing a belted sleeveless dress, tossing a ball to her young son, who wears a striped T-shirt and holds a baseball bat nearly as long as he is tall.
Credit...Leo Fuchs/Getty Images

Playing with her son, Nick, at their Los Angeles home in 1964. He would go on to become a director like his father.

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A black-and-white photo of a smiling Gena Rowlands in a black gown and fur stole, looking over her shoulder and sitting next to her husband. John Cassavetes, apparently addressing someone out of frame, wears a tuxedo and pinches a cigarette between his fingertips.
Credit...Getty Images

Collaborators on nearly a dozen films, Ms. Rowlands and Mr. Cassavetes were more than just a glamorous Hollywood power couple — though they were certainly that, too.

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A black-and-white movie still showing Gena Rowlands signing an autograph amid a crush of hangers-on.
Credit...Everett Collection

Ms. Rowlands and Ben Gazzara (second from left), her co-star in the 1977 backstage drama “Opening Night,” written and directed by her husband.

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A black-and-white photo of a smiling Gena Rowlands in a rather intricate-looking gown, arm in arm with her husband, who wears a bow tie and holds a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. Ms. Rowlands clutches a Golden Globe to her chest.
Credit...Frank Edwards/Fotos International, via Getty Images

Ms. Rowlands won one of her two Golden Globe Awards in 1975, for her work in “A Woman Under the Influence.”

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A black-and-white photo showing Gena Rowland head on, holding up a small revolver up in a dramatic pose.
Credit...Herbert Dorfman/Corbis, via Getty Images

A publicity still for “Gloria,” written and directed by her husband. Ms. Rowlands earned her second best actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a woman on the run with a young boy orphaned by the mob.

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A color photo of Gena Rowlands, her blond hair pinned back and curled up at the ends, sobbing into the face of a somber-looking Peter Falk.
Credit...Everett Collection

Her first Academy Award nomination was for her work in “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974). Writing of the astonishing vulnerability she showed in the film, the critic Roger Ebert said, “We don’t want to tap her because she might fall apart.”

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A black-and-white photo of Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Gloria Swanson and Paul Mazursky at a glamorous — if tipsy-looking — party.
Credit...Ron Galella, via Getty Images

Ms. Rowlands and Mr. Cassavetes at a party with Gloria Swanson (second from right).

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A color photo of a tanned-looking Gena Rowlands standing between her daughter Zoe Cassavetes and her mother, Lady Rowlands.
Credit...Ron Galella, Ltd./Getty Images

Ms. Rowlands in 1984 with her daughter Zoe and her mother, Mary Allen Rowlands.

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A black-and-white photo of Gena Rowlands in costume as Betty Ford, standing at a lectern with the seal of the president of the United States, arms held aloft.
Credit...ABC/Everett Collection

Starring as the first lady in “The Betty Ford Story,” a made-for-TV movie for which Ms. Rowlands earned an Emmy.

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Tom Selleck and Gena Rowlands in formal dress, smiling for a photo before a solid-blue backdrop as Ms. Rowlands holds an Emmy Award.
Credit...Ron Galella, Ltd./via Getty Images

Posing with her first Primetime Emmy Award, in 1987, with the actor Tom Selleck.

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A movie still showing Gena Rowlands and a young Martha Plimpton walking alongside Central Park.
Credit...Everett Collection

Throughout her seven-decade career, Ms. Rowlands collaborated with a range of high-profile directors, including Woody Allen. (Above, Ms. Rowlands in “Another Woman” with Martha Plimpton.)

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A color photo showing Gena Rowlands embracing and looking up at her adult son Nick, who smiles down at her. She wears a red cardigan with an leopard print scarf tied about her shoulders.
Credit...Mychele Daniau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Rowlands with her son, Nick, in 1996. She would later become known to a new generation of moviegoers in her son’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Notebook.”

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A visibly older Gena Rowlands poses for a portrait against a patterned wall. Her sunglasses are perched stylishly atop her head, and a fuchsia scarf is looped around her neck.
Credit...Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated Press

Ms. Rowlands in 2014.

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