She delivered vulnerable portraits in movies as varied as “A Woman Under the Influence,” with John Cassavetes, and the drama “The Notebook.”
1968
‘Faces’
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Perhaps the first true example of the magic Rowlands and John Cassavetes could make together came in the form of “Faces.” (Before that, she had an uncredited role in his debut, “Shadows,” as well as a part in his more conventional “A Child Is Waiting,” starring Judy Garland.) But “Faces,” made on a shoestring budget, was the project that started to reveal how unique their partnership could be. In Cassavetes’s drama about tensions between a married couple played by John Marley and Lynn Carlin, Rowlands is Jeannie, a call girl who becomes entangled with the husband in the equation. In Cassavetes’s tight close-ups and long takes you can see how Rowlands embodies the naturalistic milieu he was developing. When we first meet Jeannie she’s a good-time gal, partying with much older men, singing “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” but soon her eyes snap into focus, unwilling to be denigrated, as she develops affection for Marley’s character.
How to introduce someone to the wealth of Rowlands’s talents? Have them watch “A Woman Under the Influence.” In what is the most quintessential of her films directed by Cassavetes, she plays Mabel Longhetti, a housewife and mother in the midst of a breakdown that shape-shifts as the film progresses. Rowlands plunges you into the whirlwind of Mabel’s emotional instability with a ferality that is genuinely unnerving. There’s a danger to Mabel in the way she haphazardly gathers neighborhood children in her yard and makes them dance to “Swan Lake,” and also a joy in her tumultuousness. When she returns home from the hospital later in the movie, you can’t help but feel sad at the timid way she tiptoes around her home, the mania just brimming under the surface, eventually breaking through. Rowlands once called Mabel “my favorite role of all time because it was just so well written and it felt so real.”
1977
‘Opening Night’
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“Opening Night” was barely seen upon release — it didn’t have a full-fledged run in New York until 1991, after Cassavetes had died — and yet now the film is regarded as one of the best examples of Rowlands’s talents. As Myrtle Gordon, an actress floundering as her new play, “The Second Woman,” is set to premiere, Rowlands gives a performance one can describe as genuinely haunted. She is visited by the ghost of a young fan who was hit by a car during the show’s out-of-town tryout, but that spectral presence, vital and sexual, also represents Myrtle’s own battle and the burden she feels playing an aging woman onstage. If she performs the material well, it’s a death sentence for her career, as aging is for so many female stars. The horror of this notion infiltrates each one of Rowlands’s movements.
Far from the women on the verge she plays in “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Opening Night,” the title character here allows Rowlands to be tough as nails and ferocious. “Gloria” is still considered one of Cassavetes’s most mainstream films, released by Columbia Pictures, and he directed the movie largely at the request of Rowlands, who wanted the part. Gloria is a mobster’s former girlfriend, who becomes the unwilling caretaker of a 6-year-old boy (John Adames) when his entire family, her neighbors, are murdered in a contract killing. She’s a woman without a maternal instinct who likes her life the way it is and is resentful of the disturbance. Even as her affection for the kid grows, she never loses her rough edge, which Rowlands portrays with a smirk and a rasp in her voice. When she wields her pistol in heels and skirts, you never for a second doubt this woman can handle herself.
1991
‘Night on Earth’
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According to a 1996 article in The New York Times, Rowlands was still reeling from Cassavetes’s 1989 death when she signed on to play a passenger in Winona Ryder’s cab in this omnibus from Jim Jarmusch. The director explained that he would get calls from Cassavetes collaborators like Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel making sure Rowlands was doing well. He said: “Like, Peter Falk, who I have still never even met, would call and say: ‘Jarmusch? It’s Falk. How’s Gena? Everything good?’” Onscreen, she’s a sharp presence as a frustrated casting director who gets in the taxi of a punkish young woman. Rowlands is in full Hollywood hotshot mode, skeptical but intrigued by her uncouth driver, who calls her mom. Even when they are supposedly bonding you see the shark in Rowlands, trying to figure out how this character can be of use to her.
The steady theatrical frames of the British auteur Terence Davies feel far removed from the kinetic style of Cassavetes, but Davies’s camera reveres Rowlands just as much as her husband’s did. Davies cast Rowlands in his adaptation of the John Kennedy Toole novel of the same name, which follows a boy named David in the 1930s and ’40s Georgia. Rowlands plays David’s glamorous Aunt Mae, whose stories of being a singer enchant him and offer a window into a world behind his conservative town. Rowlands has a luminousness in the role that accurately conveys how the young David sees her, but she is careful to also show the cracks that David can comprehend only as he ages.
1996
‘Unhook the Stars’
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The Cassavetes clan has a habit of keeping things in the family, so when Nick Cassavetes directed his first feature, he naturally cast his mother in the lead. At the time, he told The Times how his mother respected his status as director: “There will always be relatives to whom you will never not be the kid who picked his nose or did something stupid. But Gena never puts that on you. She took me and the project very seriously.” The film itself is a bit treacly, about a suburban widow, Mildred (Rowlands), who starts taking care of the son (Jake Lloyd, pre-“Star Wars”) of her troubled neighbor (Marisa Tomei). It’s unusual to see Rowlands in a role so sweet.
1997
‘She’s So Lovely’
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Rowlands took a smaller part in Nick Cassavetes’s follow-up, “She’s So Lovely.” The dark comedy is based on a script by his father, and, as Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times, you can imagine that the lead role, played here by Robin Wright, could have at some point gone to Rowlands herself. Wright portrays Maureen, an alcoholic in a tumultuous marriage with Eddie (Sean Penn), Wright’s husband at the time. Midway through the movie a 10-year jump occurs, and Maureen is now a suburban mother, and Eddie is newly released from a mental institution. Rowland appears at the beginning of this section as Miss Green, a counselor who attends to Eddie. As he quakes, Rowland projects a no-nonsense mentality tinged with empathy.
2004
‘The Notebook’
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In addition to lending her talents to her son’s films, Rowlands also appeared in her daughter Zoe R. Cassavetes’s directorial debut, “Broken English.” In the indie romantic comedy Rowlands is the mother of the heroine, Nora Wilder, a New York hotel concierge (Parker Posey) trying to find love. The film follows Nora and has a shaggy quality that is reminiscent of John Cassavetes’s work. Rowlands is elegant and funny as a mother disappointed that her daughter hasn’t found a match yet.
