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.
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
John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands at the couple’s home in Los Angeles in 1961.
Ms. Rowlands began her career on 1950s television.
Playing with her son, Nick, at their Los Angeles home in 1964. He would go on to become a director like his father.
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.
Ms. Rowlands and Ben Gazzara (second from left), her co-star in the 1977 backstage drama “Opening Night,” written and directed by her husband.
Ms. Rowlands won one of her two Golden Globe Awards in 1975, for her work in “A Woman Under the Influence.”
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.
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.”
Ms. Rowlands and Mr. Cassavetes at a party with Gloria Swanson (second from right).
Ms. Rowlands in 1984 with her daughter Zoe and her mother, Mary Allen Rowlands.
Starring as the first lady in “The Betty Ford Story,” a made-for-TV movie for which Ms. Rowlands earned an Emmy.
Posing with her first Primetime Emmy Award, in 1987, with the actor Tom Selleck.
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.)
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.”
Ms. Rowlands in 2014.
THE NEW YOR K TIMES
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